HEBREW POLITICS 

IN THE TIMES OF 

SARGON AND SENNACHERIB: 



AN INQUIRY 

INTO 

THE HISTORICAL MEANING AND PURPOSE OF THE PROPHECIES 

OF ISAIAH, 



THEIR BEARINGS ON THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL 
LIFE OF ENGLAND. 



BY^EDWABD strachey. 



LONDON; 

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, 

1853. 



-J, ' 



Their orators thou then extoll'st, as those 
The top of eloquence ; statists indeed, 
And lovers of their countiy, as may seem ; 
But herein to our Prophets far beneath, 
As men divinely taught, and better teaching 
The solid rules of civil government 
In their majestic, unaffected style, 
Than all the oratory of Greece and Eome. 
In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, 
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so, 
What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat ; 
These only with our Law best form a king. 



Paradise Regained, iv. 853. 



London t 
SpoTTiswbooEs and ShaW s 
New-street- Square. 



ft 



PREFACE 



The winged bulls and alabaster bas-reliefs now brought 
from the palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib, and their 
Annals now in course of decipherment, have already 
thrown a new light on the Hebrew historians and pro- 
phets of the same period. Although the interpretation 
of the inscriptions must be farther confirmed, as well as 
carried out, before we can estimate our gain as to new 
facts, we already find that the old facts have begun to 
seem more real. For if the additional rays of light are 
still few, and the field of vision not much extended, yet 
there is just that extension which gives the roundness 
and solidity of actual life to what had hitherto some- 
what of the flatness of a mere picture, unless we could 
fill out the unaided Jewish accounts by an effort of 
the imagination. Who does not know the sense of defect, 
when he has only one account of great historical events? 
Who has not felt it, in particular, as to the Hebrew his- 
tory, hitherto left — except for a few fragments — with- 
out that kind of confirmation which even very opposite 
accounts give to each other ? However sure we might 
have been, that there was no essential misrepresentation 
in the Philippics of the Hebrew Demosthenes, when he 
denounced the imperial conquerors who ' trod down 

A 2 



r 



iv 



PREFACE. 



men as the mire of the streets, removed the bounds of 
the nations, found as a nest their riches, and gathered 
all the earth as one gathers eggs:' — yet we are not 
the less glad to read the Assyrians' own accounts of the 
way in which father and son did, year by year, and from 
country to country, receive tribute from the kings who 
submitted, and conquer and punish by captivity or 
death those who resisted ; carrying off their gods, their 
chief men, their treasures of gold and silver, their 
horses and cattle, nay, the whole inhabitants, men and 
women ; and giving up the cities to pillage, and then 
restoring them under new vassals : so that of each em- 
peror, and of each year of his reign, we may say in 
Colonel Kawlinson's words, ' his annals contain the 
usual amount of burning and plundering, sweeping off 
the old population, and planting fresh colonies in their 
place.' We knew from Isaiah that all this must have 
been so ; but the mind is not the less pleased to have 
independent evidence that it was so : — to find its infer- 
ences realised in facts. 

The antiquarian is not, however, the chief interest of 
these times of Sargon and Sennacherib. Our latest 
historians of Greece and Rome are showing us, as in a 
mirror, the very lineaments of our own age. They tell 
us of soldiers who followed their leaders to certain death, 
in obedience to the orders of those who sent them, ex- 
pecting every man to do his duty : and of citizens whose 
political vices and even passions, as well as virtues, and 
the causes of their national decay, no less than their 
national growth, are all found within the circle of con- 
stitutional government, with its juries and its parlia- 
ments, its administrations headed by the highborn, the 



PREFACE. 



V 



rich, and the respectable, and its opposition led by 
speakers who used the most unlicensed violence of 
words, without a thought of overstepping the forms of 
the constitution by act, and whom the people half de- 
spised as plebeian, while they supported them as the 
necessary check on the aristocratic men whom they pre- 
ferred to have in office. Again they show us, how con- 
stitutional freedom of thought and action in politics 
degenerated into individual selfishness or self-will, so 
that each man held it his right, or, if he was a fanatic, 
his duty, to enforce his own private view or interest, 
without regard to the good of the commonwealth : and 
how, when this vice had become incurable, the most 
enlightened patriots agreed with the most timid or 
selfish lovers of order, that nothing was left for the state 
but simple military despotism ; nothing in religion, but 
an organised superstition without faith : — which despot- 
ism and superstition would do nothing, indeed, towards 
restoring the life of the nation, but would make its in- 
evitable death more gradual, and less convulsive, than 
if they continued to try successive forms of anarchy 
under the pretence of regaining liberty : and they show 
us how the civil skill of an Augustus built up this ne- 
cessary system of state-craft, for which the sword of his 
predecessor had cleared the ground. These things, and 
much more, they tell us, and we know how to make the 
application. But when it is made, it announces an in- 
evitable law of national decay and death, which is to 
take effect upon us too, as well as upon Greece or Rome ; 
rather than a moral warning, with direction how we may 
escape our threatened destiny : and it is this latter that 
we feel we want, and of which we will not abandon the 

A 3 



PREFACE. 



hope that it may be still found. We know that in our 
personal experience the moral laws of spirit do control 
and modify the laws of nature, and in the end pro- 
duce a result which, though apparently in accordance 
with the latter, is really the complete triumph of the for- 
mer : — that the body grows old and dies, but that the 
man himself may all the while have been growing up 
towards the maturity of an imperishable life. And we 
apply the analogy to our country. We observe that all 
nations that have hitherto perished, have perished, 
partly at least, of disease originating in political vices : 
and we conclude, that if immortality is no more pos- 
sible to a nation than to anything else on earth, it 
must be possible that its decay should be that of 
simple and healthy old age ; that it should be altogether 
honourable and honoured, in that old age, by the young 
nations that spring from it ; and that it should leave 
to them the inheritance of a wholly noble character 
and spirit, and not merely that mixture of vices and 
virtues, of wisdom and error, which has come down 
to it from its great predecessors. 

This, then, is the important matter to us : whether the 
law of disease, which, as distinguished from that of age, 
is so plainly at work in England, as well as in every 
other nation of Europe, can be still arrested ; and in 
particular, whether there is truth in that half-forgotten 
faith of our statesmen in former days, that the political 
history of the Hebrews does contain indications of the 
remedy, as well as the disease, though the latter only is 
described in the books of Greece and Rome : whether, 
for instance, Milton, who was no mean statesman in a 
day when men had to show what was really in them, 



PREFACE. vii 

and who had no lack of knowledge as to what the 
ancients could teach us of politics, was right when he 
asserted of the Jewish books, that 

In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, 
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so. 

To get an answer to this question for myself; to as- 
certain whether an English squire could find in the 
Bible any political instruction which might avail him at 
union boards and county elections, and in his relations 
with the parson and the magistrate, the farmer and the 
peasant ; was my purpose when I began the study of the 
writings of Isaiah many years since : and the hope of 
serving some one desirous of such information, might 
have seemed to me excuse enough for thus attempting 
to show what I had learnt of the internal politics of 
Judea, and of their relation to those of modern England. 
But, meanwhile, there are gathering signs, that the 
times of Isaiah, and the principles which he enunciated, 
are finding, and may find more and more, their counter- 
part, and their application, in our foreign relations too. 
It may not be only Hebrew politics, but Hebrew poli- 
tics in their connection with Sargon and Sennacherib, 
that we want to study. We may know already what 
the prophet meant by his protests against 'the new 
moons and sabbaths, and the making many prayers ; ' 
and against the 4 land full of silver and gold, where men 
join house to house, and field to field, and grind the 
faces of the poor, and right not the fatherless, and jus- 
tify the wicked for reward, and are prudent in their 
own sight, but regard not the work of the Lord, nor 
the operation of His hands.' We may know, too, or 
hope to know, something of the contrary state of things, 

A 4 



viii 



PREFACE. 



when righteous and just rulers and princes show how 
4 a man can be a covert from the tempest ; ' and how 
he can 4 devise liberal things for the poor and needy, 
and fill the land with knowledge and understanding, 
and break every yoke/ But our country has, within 
the last four years, become almost as isolated, though not 
as weak, as Judea, in the midst of military despotisms. 
Our old notions of law and liberty, in religion and in 
government, are shocked by acts and maxims which re- 
mind us of the Assyrian's boast, that 4 By the grace of 
my god Assarac I have done it,' or, 4 By the strength of 
my hand, and by my wisdom, for I am prudent.' And 
while the political moralist now, as in Isaiah's day, 
recognises a needful discipline for each nation in these 
things, and asks himself what cause his own country 
can show why she should wholly escape it, he thinks — 
we all think at times — of the possibility of a contest 
in which not our mere lives, or even the life of our 
nation, but the life ■ — all that deserves the name of 
life — of the world itself, will be at stake : nor is the 
faith wanting among us that, in such a contest, God 
will have work for 4 his Englishmen,' as Milton calls us. 
Men's various tempers, and the changeable events of the 
day, may variously incline, or disincline, them to be- 
lieve that the contest will be one with fleets and armies : 
but no one doubts that — in the one sense or the other — 
a war of principles is at hand, or rather begun already. 
And, if so, it is worth our while to inquire what we 
may learn of those principles in a book which professes 
to set them forth in direct form, and with a practical, 
and for us illustrative, application to the political events 
of the writer's own time. If the principles of Isaiah 



PREFACE. 



ix 



are the true ones, his demonstration of them will not be 
the less clear and instructive, because his diagram is 
the simple constitution, and the little state, of Judea, 
and we are interested in the commonwealth of Eng- 
land, with its complicated organisation and mighty 
power. 

The reader must not, however, suppose that I have 
employed the writings of Isaiah to set forth and en- 
force some system of dogmas, political or theological, of 
my own. I have applied myself to the prophet, simply 
to learn from him whatever I might find he had to 
teach an English citizen : I have taken the book as it 
stands: and, while availing myself of the stores of 
thought and learning which the commentators of vari- 
ous schools have provided, I have, to the best of my 
ability, handled the book itself by the method of the 
Mebuhrs and the Grotes, and treated it as they — with 
thorough freedom and thorough reverence — treat the 
classical books. Wherever the method led, I have 
followed : and I now offer the sketch-map of my route 
to any one who may intend to take the same road for 
himself, and be willing to accept such help as it can 
give. If he finds its use real, he will, I trust, pardon 
some repetitions of statement which, if not inevitable 
to my plan, I have not had the skill to avoid. 

The special, but important, question, as to the genuine- 
ness of parts of the book ; which has been debated on 
theological and speculative grounds during the last 
sixty years, but on which each school still refuses to 
accept the conclusion of the other ; I have ventured to 
examine by the same — the positive — method. With 
what result, the reader will judge. 



PREFACE. 



I have given, in their proper places, the latest 
readings of the Cuneiform Inscriptions according to 
Colonel Rawlinson and Dr. Hincks ; and have shown 
their bearings upon the Jewish accounts, as well 
as upon the notices in the classical writers, and in 
Berosus and the other Oriental annalists of whom 
a few fragments have come down to us : - — so far 
as relates to the times I have treated of. But I have 
been careful to distinguish our main standing-ground ; 
which is independent of the Inscriptions, and will hold 
firm though the present interpretations of these should 
hereafter be set aside in part, or altogether. Of this, 
however, the best authorities have the least expectation ; 
and, in addition to what others have published on the 
subject, Mr. Norris, of the Asiatic Society, permits me 
to give, with the weight of his name, the following 
note, in which he states the case more lucidly, I think, 
than has yet been done : — 

" I believe the general tenour of the reading of As- 
syrian monuments is quite correct, about as correct as 
would be the reading of a Latin historical document by 
an intelligent Italian, who knew no more of Latin than 
what he might have learned through a general study of 
antiquities, and a comparison with the roots and forms 
of his own tongue : and it must be remembered that 
the monuments we have from Assyria are couched in 
the very plainest and simplest language. The reading 
of foreign names too is, I believe, accurate : of native 
names we have less certainty, as it appears to have been 
the practice of the writers rather to indicate a name than 
to spell it : — -to designate their monarchs rather as the 
favourites of this or that particular god or goddess, than 



PREFACE. 



as having vulgar names, to be written with common 
letters. Hezekiah, Menahem, Jehu, &c. I believe to be 
quite sure, and there is reason to suppose that other 
foreign names are equally ascertained : but monograms 
of gods are much less manageable, though even here 
we have now and then collateral aids which render pro- 
babilities all but certainties." 

Such collateral aids are found in the coincidence of 
the Hebrew, and fragmentary Greek, accounts — con- 
firmed in one case by a local name — with those state- 
ments of the Inscriptions which, being written in the 
ordinary manner, have been deciphered by the ordinary 
methods. Thus, within the pile of ruins which bore the 
name of Sarghun as late as the Arab conquest, were 
found inscriptions which state, among other things, that 
the builder was king of Assyria and Babylon, and swept 
away Samaria, and reduced Tyre and Ashdod ; and the 
annals of his successor relate, that he invaded Judea in 
order to compel Hezekiah to pay his accustomed tribute, 
and defeated the kings of Egypt and Meroe, who came 
to help their Jewish ally :— with various details of names 
and facts, corresponding with those of the Hebrew his- 
tory. And, if it be admitted that these names and 
facts can be so far deciphered, the conclusion is inevit- 
able, that these two Assyrian kings, under whatever 
monograms their own names are concealed, were the 
Sargon and Sennacherib of Isaiah. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Greek Orator. — The Hebrew Prophet. — The modern Preacher. — 

— Schools of the Prophets. — The Book of Isaiah — its Arrange- 
ment — its Unity. — Hypothetical and positive Criticism. — Niebuhr's 
Canons - Page 1 

CHAP. II. 

The Book of Isaiah — its Title. — Date of Chapter i. — Prophetic Ima- 
gination. — Hebrew Oratory rhythmical. — Parallels in other Nations. 

— Contents of Chapter i. — Times of Uzziah and Jotham. — Forms 
and Spirit. — National Brotherhood. — Political Ideals - - 14 

CHAP. III. 

Isaiah ii., iii., iv. Hebrew Genius imaginative rather than logical. — 
Preterite and Future Tenses in Hebrew. — The last Days. — Contrast 
of the ideal and actual State of the Nation. — Foreign Influences. — 
Private Idolatry. — Political Materialism. — National Decay. — Laws 
of God's Government of the World. — Good and evil of Commerce. — 
Hebrew Matrons. — Female Luxury — its Punishment. — The Branch 
of the Lord. — The restored though humbled Nation - -32 

CHAP. IV. 

Isaiah v. Coming Woes. — Fusing Power of Imagination. — Hebrew 
Idyll. — Ancient Fertility of Judea — present Barrenness. — The 
Vineyard of the Lord of hosts. — Selfishness in an Aristocracy. 
Rights and Duties of Landowners. — Property a Trust — Hebrew 
and English Laws of Entail. — Word and Work of the Lord. — God 
a Constitutional Ruler. — Abuse of Words by worldly Men. — Thu- 
cydides. — Fulfilment of Isaiah's Threats to his Cotemporaries — and 
to all Ages since. — Grotius on Prophecy - - 49 



xiv 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. V. 

Isaiah vi. The Prophet's Commission. — The Temple — its Scenes. — 
The Vision. — Insight into the Life of Things. — Prophecy rational 
and intelligible. — God the real and actual King. — Plural of Majesty. 

— Holiness of God — His Justice. — Calvinism - - Page 67 

CHAP. VI. 

Isaiah vii. The Accession of Ahaz. — Political State of King and People. 

— ' The Lord said.' — Topography of Jerusalem. — The Virgin con- 
ceiving. — The Incarnation an universal Idea — how realised. — Loss 
of Hebrew Independence. — Isaiah not a Magician - 84 

CHAP. VII. 

Isaiah viii. — ix. 7. The Symbolical Family. — Ancient and modern Habits 
of Public Men. — Siloah and Euphrates. — The Panic of Judah, and 
its Remedy. — Galilee of the Gentiles. — The National Gloom. — The 
Great Light. — The Messiah. — Gradual Development of the Prophet's 
Anticipations - - - - - - 100 

CHAP. VIII. 

Isaiah ix. 8. — xii. Epic Unity. — Obstinate Energy of the Hebrew Race. 
Lawlessness of the Ten Tribes. — Legalism of Judah. — The King of 
Assyria. — Gods in the Image of Men. — The Scourge of Nations,, and 
its Wielder. — Ancient Roads. — The King of the Stock of Jesse. — 
The Golden Age. — Fusion of Conflicting Elements in a Nation. — 
Consequences of the Revolt of Ephraim. — Deportation of Jews in 
Isaiah's Time. — The Universal Church — . its Relation to the World. 

— The Water of Salvation - - - - - 1 1 1 

CHAP. IX. 

Isaiah xiii., xiv. Genuineness of the Prophecies on Babylon. — Scep- 
tical Criticism — its Origin and Progress — not Positive or Construc- 
tive. — Orthodox Criticism. — Results of the Controversy. — Tra- 
ditional Comments confounded with the Text. — Hebrew Historical 
Notices of Babylon — Assyrian Notices. — Babylon sacked in Isaiah's 
Time by Persians, and perhaps by Medes. — Babylon a Diagram or 
Ideograph. — Arguments from Style. — Suspense better than hasty 
Decision. — Final Overthrow of the Empire of Force - 1 40 

CHAP. X. 

Isaiah xiv. 28. Philistia. — Origin of the Philistines — their Extermi- 
nation commanded by Moses Law of Conquests and Exterminations. 



CONTENTS. 



XV 



— British Conquest of India. — Evil not Eternal. — Philistia's Re- 
lations with Judah — with Assyria. — Sargon and Sennacherib in 
Philistia - - - - - - Page 163 

CHAP. XI. 

Isaiah xv., xvi. Moab — probably reduced by Shalmaneser. — History 
of Moab — Picture of its Overthrow. — Tribute of Lambs due to Judah. 

— Friendship with Judah advised. — Modern Distinction between the 
animal and spiritual Life. — Corporate Unity of a State - 174 

CHAP. XII. 

Isaiah xvii., xviii. Damascus, Ephraim, and Ethiopia. — Probable Date 
and Unity of this Prophecy. — The Hush of Nations. — The general 
Panic. — Worldly Alliances. — God's Deliverance. — Notion of this 
Prophecy being a Myth — not well founded - - 183 

CHAP. XIII. 

Isaiah xix. Egyptian Dynasties in the Time of Isaiah — Cotemporary or 
Successive. — Historical Notices from various Sources. — Anarchy. — 
Invasion of Sargon. — Sack of Thebes. — Treaty between Egypt and 
Assyria. — Multitude of Gods and of Castes unfavourable to Political 
Unity. — Exclusive Wisdom of Priesthood. — The City of Destruction. 

— Alexander and Ptolemy. — Temple of Onias. — Septuagint. — 
Philo. — Church of Alexandria. — Bacon on Prophecy - - 189 

CHAP. XIV. 

Isaiah xx, Sargon, Shalmaneser, Tartan. — The Siege of Ashdod. — 
Shebna's Policy of Alliances. — Isaiah's Symbolical Protest against it — 
he walks naked and barefoot. — Isaiah's Policy probably more Ex- 
pedient — certainly more befitting Israel's Place in Universal History 

196 

CHAP. XV. 

Isaiah xxi. A Vision in a Dream or Trance. — Bible Meaning of In- 
spiration. — Divination. — Ancient Oracles. — Special Powers of Na- 
tions and Individuals. — One Greece, one Shakspeare. — Discernment 
of Political Effects in their Causes less possible now than formerly. — 

— ' The Desert of the Sea.' — The Prophet a Watchman. — The Tribes 
of Arabia — subjected by Assyria - 202 

CHAP. XVI. 

Isaiah xxii. Political Parties at Jerusalem. — Shebna and the Majority, 
j — Eliakim and the Minority. — Isaiah's Attack on Shebna. — Prepara- 



xvi 



CONTENTS. 



tions for the Siege. — Topography of Jerusalem. — Site of Sion. — 
Spirit of the People and King. — Fall of Shebna. — Sufferings of 
Modern Nations from Invasion. — Moral and Religious Results. — 
Prussia. — Switzerland. - Page 211 

CHAP. XVII. 

Isaiah xxiii. The Phenicians — Historical Notices — Their Trade — 

— Carriers of Philosophy and Politics — Relations with Israel. — 
The Tyrian Hercules — their Religion Political, not Natural. — Siege 
of the Island-Tyre by Shalmaneser — by Nebuchadnezzar — by Alex- 
ander — present State. — Authorship of the Prophecy. — The Dis- 
penser of Crowns. — The Queen of Cities dishonoured. — Tyre for- 
gotten Seventy Years — shall sing as an Harlot - - 227 

CHAP. XVIII. 

Isaiah xxiv. — xxvii. Utter Desolation of Judah — actually caused by 
the Assyrian Armies. — National Covenant, broken by Ahaz — he shuts 
the Temple. — God's Counsels of Old. — Moab put for Assyria. — Pa- 
tience in National Calamities. — The Wife divorced, and taken back. — 
The Silver Trumpet sounded. — Expansion of Isaiah's Views - 239 

CHAP. XIX. 

Isaiah xxviii, — xxxv. The Political, Moral, and Religious State and 
Prospects of Judah. — Ariel, the Lion of God. — Worldly State-Craft. 

— 1'rue Insight. — The Embassy to Egypt. — Persecution of the Pro- 
phets. — Dumb Idols and the Unseen Teacher. — The Holy Solemnities. 

— Talmudical Account of Festal Processions. — The Stroke of Doom 
on Sennacherib. — The Real Deliverer. — Social Influence of Women. 

— The Siege raised. — Edom put for Assyria. — Return of the ran- 
somed Captives - - - - - - - - 248 

CHAP. XX. 

Isaiah xxxvi., xxxvii. Historical Events of Sennacherib's Invasion and 
Retreat — his Letter — how answered. — Unconscious Genius in the 
Narrative. — Rab-Shakeh's Theology. — Isaiah's Inspiration. — ' The 
Incarnate Wrath of God.' — Zion's Defiance. — The 'Sign* of the 
Spontaneous Crops. — The Destroying Angel. — Sethos delivered by 
Vulcan. — Value of Sennacherib's Annals, if established — their Altered 
Tone after this Year. — German War of Freedom. — History teaches 
a Belief in Providence. — Niebuhr. — Grote - - - 271 

CHAP. XXI. 

Isaiah xxxviii. The Sickness of Hezekiah. — Importance of his Life to 
his Nation. — his Desire of Recovery not purely Selfish. — Fear of 



CONTENTS. 



xvii 



Death in Old Times. — Christ's Resurrection. — The Sign of the Sha- 
dow on the Sun-Dial. — Two Accounts — the Cotemporary One not 
Miraculous. — Bible to be treated like other Books. — Not so treated by 
Sceptics. — The Hymn of Hezekiah - Page 285 

CHAP. XXII. 

Isaiah xxix. : The Embassy from Babylon. — Chronicle of Eusebius. — 
Berosus. — Sennacherib's Annals. — Books of Kings and Chronicles. — 
Value of the Latter. — The Sin of Hezekiah. — Trusting God in Po- 
litics. — Modern History. — Niebuhr and Naples. — Colletta. — Reve- 
rence for Great Men. — Nations and Rulers re-act on each other. — 
Hezekiah's Reception of the Embassy. — Isaiah's Denunciation. — 
' Apres moi le Deluge.' — Prosperity of England. — Religious Temper 
of our Statesmen. — Mr. Gladstone - 2p5 

CHAP. XXIII. 

Isaiah xl — lxvi.: Question of the Genuineness of the last Chapters 
of Isaiah. — Pseudo-Isaian Hypothesis. — The Name of Cyrus. — 
Coresh, and the Lord's Servant. — Modern Explanations. — Moller's 
Interpretation. — Doubts and Certainties. — The Positive Method. — 
Coherence of earlier and later Prophecies. — The earlier not fulfilled as 
Isaiah had expected. — Enlargement of his Views. — Finite and In- 
finite Ideals. — Facts for Induction as to the Nature of Prophecy. — 
Note on Strauss, and the Application of Positive Criticism to Chris- 
tianity ------- 3io 

CHAP. XXIV. 

The Vision of the Captivity and Deliverance. — The Transitory and the 
Permanent. — God in Nature, and in Human Society. — The Power- 
less Gods of the Nations. — The Jewish Institution of the Redeemer. 
— Its Effect on the more enlightened Jews. — The Deliverer, King, and 
Teacher. — The Work of Isaiah and Hezekiah. — Its Success and its 
Failure. — Jewish Idea of the Messiah. — Its Relation to their Poli- 
tical Life. — Atonement a Human Fact. — A rational Idea. — Union 
of Half-Truths. — The Messiah of the Gospel. — The Prophets and 
the Apostles. — Isaiah's Science of Politics — His Death — His 
Triumph - - - - - 332 



Appendix ------ 353 



a 



HEBjREW politics, 



CHAPTER I. 

THE GREEK ORATOR. — THE HEBREW PROPHET. THE MODERN PREACHER. 

SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS. THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. ITS ARRANGE- 
MENT — ITS UNITY. HYPOTHETICAL AND POSITIVE CRITICISM. NIE- 

BUHR'S CANONS. 

The Spartan king told Xerxes that he was no match for the 
Greeks, e because they, though free, had a master — the law 
— over them, which they feared more than the Persians did his 
despotic will.' And the Athenian orator, looking back on the 
great struggle after a generation or two had passed, gave his 
countrymen the same explanation of their fathers' success 
( against the barbarian myriads of the king of Asia : ' he pointed 
out how ( they had done such noble and wonderful deeds, 
because they were already organised into a free commonwealth 
in which the good were honoured, and the bad restrained, by 
law; because they knew and held that it should be left to 
brute beasts to control each other by mutual violence, such as 
oriental kings and subjects lived by, but that it became men to 
define rights by law, to persuade to its maintenance or expan- 
sion by rational and instructive speech, and in their conduct to 
follow the guidance of both these, — the law their king, and 
speech their teacher.' 

The orator enunciated an eternal truth. Had it been less 
than eternal, it could not be still keeping its ground, and 
still sustaining the life of every nation which holds to it, or 



2 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



indeed, although we (not to judge of others) hold never so im- 
perfectly to it: for though we are ready enough to thank God 
that we English are not as other men, we might more reason- 
ably reflect how often we are all on the verge of doing what 
lies in us to disturb the perfect play of those two forces, of 
entire obedience to the law and absolute right of discussion, 
according as either may check some private opinion or class 
interest ; and how seldom we remember that one step beyond 
that verge lies the region of mutual violence with the cor- 
relates of despotism and insurrection in which its vitality 
consists. But this truth, this universal law of human society, 
has not only outlasted the polities of Greece, but was not first 
discovered there, as the Athenians supposed ; nor was the ex- 
ercise of this master right and power of words tf so originally 
and peculiarly the possession of Greeks alone among all living 
creatures, that' (as their panegyrist goes on to say) 6 if any 
other people did acquire it from them, this only extended the 
name of Grecian to distinctions of mind as well as race, so that 
they were called by it who shared their education rather than 
those who had their blood.' Another people had been set, 
many centuries earlier, to work out some of the same, with 
some very different, problems of human society, and under not 
wholly dissimilar conditions, internal and external : and while 
the Hebrew as well as the Greek could have pointed to various 
other proofs that his was a commonwealth, or constitutionally 
organised body-politic, as distinguished from the inorganic 
despotisms of Assyria or Persia, the one fixed on the same 
marks as the other did, as the characteristic ones: the 'Nomos 
and Logos ' of the Greek were anticipated by their true 
counterparts the e Law and the Prophets ' of the Hebrew. 

Isaiah, no less than Demosthenes, might have said that it was 
the. office of the political speaker and adviser, 6 to see events in 
their beginnings, to discern their purport and tendencies from 
the first, and to forewarn his countrymen accordingly ; to con- 
fine within the narrowest bounds those political vices of habitual 
procrastination, supineness, ignorance, and love of strife, which 
are inevitable in all states ; and to dispose men's minds instead 
to enlightened concord and unanimity, and to the zealous dis- 
charge of their social duties : ' and he too might have added, 



INSTITUTIONS FOR NATIONAL CULTURE. 



3 



e All these things have I done, and no creature can say that I 
have ever left any of them undone ; I do not shrink from your 
scrutiny, be it never so strict.' * But there were differences as 
well as resemblances between the orator and the prophet, and 
we must look for further illustrations elsewhere. 

If we were to describe a nation, in the political constitution of 
which was found an incorporated and endowed body of men, 
with the business of caring for all those interests of the nation 
which did not fall under the heads of trade, agriculture, war, 
or domestic and feudal (that is, patriarchal) government ; 
who practised the more difficult branches of medicine, law, and 
statesmanship ; who bestowed a religious consecration on all 
states of national, family, and personal life — delivering the 
crown and sceptre to the sovereign in trust from the King of 
kings, joining the hands of man and wife in the name of God, 
and enrolling, as a citizen, the babe who has just before been 
received into the congregation ; who claimed the right, and 
acknowledged the duty, of educating every member of the na- 
tion to apprehend his privileges and obligations, not only as 
a citizen, but as a man, and of teaching him that his greatest 
dignity and happiness, and his truest and deepest communion 
with his fellow-men and with God, belong to him as a man, 
and will be his in proportion as this, his proper humanity, is 
renewed in him ; and who rescued one day in each week 
from worldly employments, devoting it to public worship and 
holy rest, and thus providing the opportunity and means for 
keeping up that consecration of the nation, and for carrying on 
that education of the people : — if we were to draw such a pic- 
ture, it would suit equally the old constitutions of England 
and the other nations of Christendom, and that of the Jewish 
nation, whence their model was, no doubt, derived. And though 
decay and growth have conspired to efface many of the original 
characteristics of the c Church of England,' and to provide 
other means for the execution of many of its old functions, it is 

* Demosthenes, de Corona, c. 73. This, and the preceding passages from 
Herodotus (vii. 104.), Lysias (ii. 17 — 20.), and Isocrates (iv. 53 — 56.), are 
pointed out as characteristic of the political life of Greece, by Mr. Grote : 
History, vii. 498., ix. 116. 



4 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



still not only the best, but a thoroughly effective illustration 
of the analogous ' estate of the realm' of Israel. 

It is an obscure, though interesting, inquiry what was 
the rightful (we know what was the corrupt) practice of the 
Hebrew people, and their ministers the Levites, as to the 
local worship of the Lord God. The practice among the 
patriarchs, and in the early commonwealth, of setting up an 
altar on every spot which had been hallowed by some mani- 
festation of God's power or favour ; the organisation of the 
synagogues, all over the country, in later times ; the character 
of the nation so religious in spirit and not merely in forms ; the 
story of Elijah building the altar on Mount Carmel; are among 
the indications of w T hat in itself seems so probable, that during 
the middle ages of the nation there may have been modes of 
local worship of the true God in accordance with the design 
with which Moses had scattered the Levites among the people, 
and which were not comprehended in those repeated denuncia- 
tions of the worship of ' the High Places ' which occur through- 
out the histories of the kings. Be this as it may, the ecclesi- 
astical law of the Israelites at least appointed the Levites to 
perform the sacrifices and other services of the tabernacle or 
temple ; to assist in, and give a religious sanction to, all the 
main proceedings of the nation and its kings ; to instruct the 
people in the law, — for which end they had the tithes allotted to 
them, that they might reside in every part of the country when 
their turn was past for attending at the temple ; to keep the 
genealogies and other records of the state; and to administer 
what w 7 e should now call its sanitary code. And out of this 
spiritualty, or order of clergy, grew the institution and order of 
Prophets, or preachers, educated in colleges or schools of the 
Prophets. Such colleges existed at Ramah, Bethel, J ericho, Gil- 
gal, and Jerusalem ; there was a president or < father,' in which 
office we find Samuel and Elisha ; and his disciples and asso- 
ciates, who bore the names of ' sons of the prophets,' lived with 
him in a common habitation, and shared a common table. We 
are told that they c prophesied with the psaltery, tabret, pipe 5 
and harp : 5 their writings show them to have been students, 
nay masters, of poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy, as well as of 
music ; and they were historians, though only brief abstracts 



NATIONAL EDUCATION OF THE HEBREWS. 



5 



of their historical works survive : practical, no less than specu- 
lative and literary, politicians, they habitually show themselves 
educated to the use of the mental and moral powers which 
were required for advising their kings, at home and in foreign 
affairs ; and — what belonged to a still higher training — for 
advising and directing the people how to resist those kings 
when the latter set the constitution deliberately at nought, and 
yet not fall into the same guilt themselves. There seems no 
reason for supposing that kings and princes were not, when 
they pleased, educated in these schools, as well as the prophets. 
It was eminently a national education : in the Psalms, Pro- 
phets, and other Scriptures of the Old (nay, of the New) Tes- 
tament, we see its results, extending through the whole life of 
the nation for 1500 years : in the Pentateuch we see how its 
foundations were laid by the great Hebrew legislator, in further- 
ance of his design, that all nations should have cause to say, 
( Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people ; ' 
and in the historical notices, brief as they are, of these schools 
of the prophets, we have just the fact of an adequate working 
instrument, to connect the design and the results. But though 
regular education was not less, neither was it more, important 
in the Hebrew than in other nations. The prophet Amos says, 
6 1 was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son ; but I was an 
herdman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit : and the Lord took 
me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, 
prophesy unto my people Israel.' And no doubt this was not 
the only instance in a body, of whom one of the characteristic 
features was that they should not belong exclusively to any one 
tribe, or rank, or profession, and that each should ' speak as he 
was moved by the Holy Ghost.' Yet here as elsewhere the 
settled institutions of the country will have exercised their due 
influence in forming the character even of those individuals who 
did not come into immediate contact with them. 

The prophets were the preachers, not the predicters, the forth- 
speakers of God's eternal plan and methods of governing man, not 
foretellers of particular events, of and to their nation : this was 
what 6ur Lord and his apostles understood by the name, and 
so has it always been understood in modern times of earnest- 
ness and zeal, such as our Reformation or Civil War, when men 

B 3 



6 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



interpreted the Bible by experience gained in the council- 
chamber, the battle-field, or the prison, rather than by collation 
of commentators.* And while we may pursue our illustration 
by comparing the schools of the prophets with the monasteries 
and colleges which have hitherto sent out most, if not all, the 
great prophets of Christendom, as well as the multitude of 
ordinary teachers, we shall find a real and instructive resem- 
blance between these and the Hebrew prophets. The sermons 
and other discourses, of a Latimer at Paul's Cross, of a Luther 
at the Diet of Worms, or a Knox before the Popish queen and 
nobles ; the field-preachings of a Wesley or Whitfield, and, 
within narrower limits, the orations of a Burke in defence of 
justice, laws, institutions ; — these, taken with the lives and 
acts, and, where need was, the deaths of the men, are the true 
counterparts of what Isaiah and the rest of the Hebrew pro- 
phets said, did, or suffered. 

But facts — facts in their detail, and in their original and 
living coherence, are our best teachers. We shall best learn 
what the prophets were to the Jews, and what they are to us, 
by a methodical examination of what the greatest of them said 
and did, during a chief crisis of his country's history. The 
meaning of facts came to light in the collision of the Assyrian 
empire with the Hebrew commonwealth, as they did when 
Xerxes invaded Greece, or Napoleon overran Europe : and if 
we will take the book of Isaiah, and follow its guidance, we may 
expect to see its facts in their own proper light. This, there- 
fore, I propose to do. The reader will find the English text, for 
reference, at the end of the volume. 

As our familiarity with this Book of Isaiah increases, we 
find that the careful literary composition and elaborate finish 
of the single prophecies, noticeable as it is, is less so than 
that with which these are again fused into larger, but 
not less organic members, and these again into one perfect 

* Matt. iii. 1—12., xi. 9—14.; Luke, i. 17, 76, 77.; Rom. xii. 6.; 
1 Cor. xi. 4. ; xiv. 6., &c. Milton hopes (in his Speech for the Liberty of 
Unlicensed Printing), that England is on the eve of becoming 4 a nation of 
prophets :' and Jeremy Taylor entitles his book on the like subject, A Dis- 
course of the Liberty of Prophesying, without any intimation that he is using 
the word in an unusual sense. 



GERMAN AND ENGLISH CRITICAL METHODS. 



7 



whole. And the most simple and probable explanation of this 
arrangement, if there be no insurmountable obstacle to its 
acceptance, is plainly to attribute it to Isaiah himself. If it 
can be shown that this explanation, of the prophet's own 
arrangement of the book in its present form, is absolutely incom- 
patible with the undoubted nature of its contents, we must give 
it up, and refer the compilation to such later date as the exigen- 
cies of the case require ; but we must not overlook that the 
latter is on the face of it the hypothetical and speculative, and 
the former the historical and positive criticism. For the 
arrangement of the book, with its general and particular titles 
and its historical notices, together with all that these assert 
(till contradicted) as to the authorship, have come clown to us 
from time immemorial by exactly the same means as the text 
itself, of which they must therefore be taken to be an integral 
and original part, until the contrary is proved ; and the one no 
less than the other must be protected by that canon of criticism, 
that no conjecture, however ingenious, must disturb the in- 
tegrity of the text however obscure, until the actual reading 
has been shown to be hopelessly corrupt. We cannot altogether 
dispense with supposition and conjecture as helps to the eluci- 
dation of such parts of this book as, by reason of their antiquity, 
must now remain without any more certain explanation ; nor 
need we doubt that conjectural criticism often throws a real, 
though a flickering, light on objects which are but dimly dis- 
cernible in the distance of ages, if only the torch be kindled by 
a mind thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the writer com- 
mented on, and held in steady, that is judicious, hands. The 
studious and meditative genius of the German eminently quali- 
fies him for these speculative inquiries and explanations ; but 
while the Englishman avails himself of them, with the frank 
acknowledgment that he could never have originated them 
himself, he must not scruple to test and modify them by the 
practical common 'sense which is his birthright, and which, if a 
more modest, is not a less useful gift than the other. Nor must 
we forget that Niebuhr, the greatest of the German critics of 
this kind, himself pointed out the true method of testing his 
own and all other such conclusions. He constantly endea- 
vours to verify his hardy conjectures by reference to corre- 

b 4 



8 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



sponding facts of other times and countries, and thus to ascer- 
tain that he is not dreaming, but discovering and applying the 
real laws of history ; and his method is not the less the true 
one, though grave English scholars may sometimes think his 
particular conclusions those of the advocate rather than the 
judge. To exhaust the evidence and the arguments on every 
side of a question is the German's proper calling : and I believe 
that the help . of the German commentators is indispensable to 
our thorough understanding of the Prophecies of Isaiah; yet 
that they will be most serviceable to him who can best check 
speculation with not literal but matter-of-fact criticism; who 
can abstain from doubting historical facts because cotemporary 
records relate them in ways not easy of verbal reconciliation, or 
in phrases not the most obvious or likely if tried by the standard 
of his own mind ; and who is content to account for all such 
minor difficulties and discrepancies in the same way as he must 
the like ones which he finds in the books of his own day, and 
which the still living authors cannot, or do not, explain. Com- 
mentators often darken the text with the mists of their own 
undue speculativeness ; and by returning to a more practical 
method of investigation, by studying the book as it is, and not 
as ingenious theorists say it must have been, we shall often 
secure a firm pathway through difficulties that conjecture has 
hopelessly perplexed. 

The arrangement of the Book of Isaiah's Prophecies, as it 
has come down to us, is mainly chronological, yet sometimes 
with reference to the subjects rather than to the dates of the 
several pieces which form it. A like method is observable in 
St. Matthew's Gospel, in which the miracles, parables, and 
discourses of our Lord are collected into groups without strict 
regard to the order of time ; and the Pentateuch, the Book of 
Psalms, and the Bible itself as a whole, show that the appro- 
priateness of such composite arrangement has been recognised 
by the Jewish and the Christian Church. And we have a 
modern instance of the kind, with an exposition of its import- 
ance, in Mr. Wordsw r orth's avowedly deliberate arrangement of 
his poems into a whole. 

The particular arguments will be found in their several 
places: the general conclusion I deduce from them is, that 



THE BOOK OF ISAIAII. 



0 



chapter vi. is the account of Isaiah's consecration to the pro- 
phetic office, and its date the earliest in the book; that the 
three preceding discourses (chapters i., ii. — iv., v.) are placed 
first, in order to set forth the state of the nation at the time 
Isaiah began to prophesy, and the consequent fitness of the 
severe terras of the commission given him ; and that the rest of 
the book preserves the chronological order, with possibly such 
modifications as might serve to bring together similar prophecies, 
such as the series of ' burdens' on the neighbouring nations ; and 
probably also in certain cases (chapters vii. — xii., xvii. xviii., 
xxviii. — xxxv., xl. — lxvi.) with some revision and fusion of dis- 
courses originally distinct, so that they are now successive 
paragraphs in a continuous writing. The supposed insurmount- 
able obstacles to the acceptance of the historical assertion 
involved in the book itself, that it owes its present form to 
Isaiah's own hand, are the account of the 1 Sign ' of the shadow 
going back on the dial, and the doubt — which, indeed, the most 
eminent German critics say is not a doubt, but a final decision 
in the negative, — whether certain portions of the book were 
written by Isaiah at all. These will be best considered as they 
occur ; only I will here observe, that in examining the latter 
question, the student must be on his guard against the fallacy 
contained in an argument sometimes employed as to the arrange- 
ment of the book, and which supposes it to be a collection like 
those which are popularly called the £ Psalms of David,' and 
the ( Proverbs of Solomon,' though it is admitted that only a 
portion of each can be ascribed to its nominal author. The 
fallacy is in assuming that there is no difference between a real 
title, and a popular name, of a book. In the Hebrew the 
respective titles are, ' Isaiah,' 6 Psalms,' £ Proverbs,' with no 
names attached to the two last ; and both of these contain 
special titles expressly attributing various portions to other 
authors, while the whole book of Isaiah is almost as expressly 
attributed to him. Let the reader test the reality of this 
historical evidence (without prejudice to the internal counter- 
evidence we may come to by-and-by) by asking himself how we 
could strengthen it, even now we know the attack it has to 
stand. On the other hand, let me entreat him to keep his eyes 
open to the actual arrangement of the book, as we follow 



10 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



its detail. If we find indications that the whole, looked 
at as a whole, is more like the growth of an individual mind 
than a collection of writings of men who lived in times far 
apart from each other; if we can, as we proceed, trace the 
manner and method in which the prophet's views opened out, 
as he came in contact with, and sought for the deepest springs 
of, the circumstances and events of his own times ; then the 
proportion and relation of particular parts to each other and to 
the whole will become an important element of the question, 
and those of which the genuineness is disputed will be seen in a 
light, and with advantages, not available to us if we merely analyse 
each separately. The fact of such a vital coherence and inter- 
dependence will, I believe, become more and more apparent as we 
go on ; we shall find a harmony resulting not from mere me- 
chanical compilation, but from the presence of a one informing 
and enlivening spirit, and our reason no less than our religious 
feeling will resist the dismemberment of any part of the per- 
fectly organised whole. And if so, we shall (as can hardly be 
too often repeated) escape from the hypothetical to the positive 
and the historical. 

But the hypothetical criticism has its own rebound ; and the 
very commentators who are least sensitive to the weight of evi- 
dence in favour of the facts we have, are most ingenious in making 
out more and more historical dates and details of what they 
say must have been the events of Isaiah's time, and alluded to 
by him in his prophecies. Such criticism is valuable, in as far 
as it is a real induction ; and an unhoped for, and most inte- 
resting verification of it is now in progress by the help of the 
Cuneiform Inscriptions, which are already found to mention 
several facts which the Bible historians had passed in silence, 
but which are precisely those which the student of the pro- 
phets knew to be wanted, and which he had to assume in any 
attempt to form a distinct picture of the times. But the limit 
of real induction is soon reached ; and it has grown the fashion 
to expatiate beyond it till the commentator becomes unable to 
distinguish between facts and fancy. Each sees the error in 
his neighbour ; but we shall perhaps best guard against it in 
ourselves if we consider that we possess no such power of dis- 
covering more than a mere outline of the facts on which any 



ALLUSIONS TO LOST FACTS. 



11 



such book, even written by a still living author, is founded : no 
two men, even though fellow-countrymen and cotemporaries, 
look at the same facts in exactly the same light, nor does either 
draw exactly the same inferences as the other would ; and espe- 
cially, perhaps, is this the case in writings in which the imagina- 
tion of the poet or orator has a large part, because it is one of 
the prerogatives of the imagination not to be tied down to 
literal facts, but to modify, while it employs, these instruments 
of illustrating universal ideas or laws. It might have seemed 
the easiest thing possible to supply the facts assumed in most 
of Wordsworth's poems, by a simple enough use of the ' higher 
criticism ; ' but the actual statement of those facts in his lately 
published Life shows that they were quite different from what 
any criticism could have suspected.* We must admit of the 
Hebrew, what Mebuhr asserts of the Greek and Latin, litera- 
ture, — that though we may be able to see that some facts were 
present to the writer's mind, it is often no more possible to re- 
piece them into an historical statement than it is to restore the 
statues or columns to which we know must have once belonged 
those marble fragments which we see everywhere built into the 
walls in modern Home. We must be content with him to define 
the true interpretation of an ancient book as ' an expression 
of its meaning as it was understood, if not by its cotempo- 
raries, yet by those who lived shortly after, when the passing al- 
lusions of the moment icere lost.''] Nor is it merely lapse of 

* He presents, as though he had himself witnessed, various occurrences 
related to him by his sister ; he also says of the Evening Walk, — " The 
plan of it has not been confined to a particular walk, or an individual place ; 
a proof (of which T was unconscious at the time) of my unwillingness to 
submit the poetic spirit to the chains of fact and real circumstance. The 
country is idealised rather than described in any one of its local aspects." — . 
Memoirs, vol. i. p. 68. Southey supplies us with another illustration : — 
" In one point I thought him (Sir George Beaumont) too much of an 
artist ; none of his pictures represented the scene from which he took them ; 
he took the features, and disposed them in the way which pleased him best. 

You shall see a little piece of his ... . which perfectly illustrates 

this : the subject is this very house, and scarcely any one object in the pic- 
ture resembles the reality. His wish was to give the character, the spirit of 
the scene " — Life and Correspondence, vol. vi. p. 216. 

f Letter to a Student of Philology, translated in the Educational Magazine 
for January, 1840, and since then in his Life and Letters, 



12 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



time which prevents our now recovering all the detail of the facts 
present to the eyes or minds of Isaiah, or the other prophets. 
Jeremiah's statement (chap, xxxvi. 2. 4.), that in the fourth 
year of Jehoiakim he wrote in a book all the words that he 
had spoken during a period of about twenty years : the 
fact that the short book of Micah is a summary of his dis- 
courses delivered during three reigns, as we learn from its title : 
the existence of like titles and inscriptions throughout the Pro- 
phetical Books : the explanatory narratives in some of them, and 
the manner in which these are introduced : the exact rhythmical 
structure, and elaborate finish of the composition, both of 
thoughts and language : all show that the writings of the pro- 
phets, as we now have them, are not verbal reports of their dis- 
courses set down before, or at the moment of, delivery, but 
careful literary compositions, in which these national preachers, 
at their leisure, and with the deliberate judgment and ability 
which the books themselves exhibit, put on record what was of 
permanent interest to their countrymen, and to all coming ages 
and peoples. And in doing this they would certainly (like men 
in the same circumstances now) obliterate, or suffer to become 
indistinct, references to events which were of absorbing interest 
at the moment of speaking, but which had given place to others 
at the time of writing, perhaps many years afterwards, though 
the eternal and universal truths which those particular events 
had best illustrated then, continued as important, and as worthy 
of proclamation as ever.* Nor need we lament that we cannot 
restore these marks which the prophets have not themselves 
thought it necessary to retain. They are not only not neces- 
sary for a right understanding of our authors, but would have 
been a real hindrance : for they would have inevitably over- 
laid those universal truths, those clear enunciations of the laws 
of God's government of the world, which they teach us to see in 
all history, and especially in our own, and in which — and not in 
picking out stray historical facts — the real interest of the He- 
brew prophets for us consists. But if some commentators are 

* See Ewald, Die Propheten, i. 42. There is a translation of the first two 
sections of the Introduction (to which I thus refer) in Kitto's Journal of 
Sacred Literature, for January, 1853. Let me here acknowledge my many 
and great obligations to this profound religious philosopher. 



IMPORTANCE OF SUCH ALLUSIONS. 



13 



thus mistaken in their anxiety to invent what they cannot find, 
others go into the other extreme of indifference to those links 
between the prophet and his own times which do actually re- 
main, and are so important in enabling us to feel that he was 
a real flesh and blood man: the middle, matter-of-fact course 
of taking just what we really have given us, is the best, alike 
for historical and for philosophical and theological purposes. 



14 



HEBREW POLITICS, 



CHAPTER II. 

THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. ITS TITLE. DATE OF CHAPTER I. — PROPHETIC 

IMAGINATION. HEBREW ORATORY RHYTHMICAL. PARALLELS IN OTHER 

NATIONS. CONTENTS OF CHAPTER I. TIMES OF UZZIAH AND JOTHAM. 

FORMS AND SPIRIT. NATIONAL BROTHERHOOD. — POLITICAL IDEALS. 

The book begins with its title : — ( The vision of Isaiah, which 
he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, 
Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.' 

This is at once the title of the whole book, and the title of 
the chapter of which it forms the first verse ; so as to indi- 
cate that the chapter is an introduction to the book, and a 
summary of its contents. If we compare it with the similar 
titles to the books of Amos and Micah, we may see from that 
comparison that there is no need for the conjecture of Vitringa, 
adopted by so many of his successors, that it, at first, ended 
with the word 4 Jerusalem,' and belonged only to the single 
prophecy contained in the first chapter, and that some compiler 
of the book added the rest of the sentence to make a title for 
the whole. That the expression, 6 concerning Judah and Jeru- 
salem,' should be thus prefixed to prophecies which relate to 
Ephraim, Egypt, Assyria, and other neighbouring nations, will 
not appear a difficulty (if it ever did so), when we bear in 
mind that the language of the Hebrew, and above all, of the 
Hebrew prophet, regards the life and force rather than the 
formal accuracy of its expressions. The highest kind of ac- 
curacy indeed, that which distinguishes and asserts the real 
differences and relations of things, it has; but it is careless 
of, or rather unacquainted with, that classical precision of 
word and inference which all European discourse is more or 
less imbued with. For the destiny of all these nations did in 
truth £ concern ' Judah and Jerusalem, and only for this reason 
became the object of Isaiah's consideration. f Whatever he 



ISAIAH I. 1. : DATE OF FIRST CHAPTER. 



15 



utters against the heathen nations, he says it all for the sake 
of Judah.'* 

But while this first prophecy, or discourse, forms a suitable 
summary and introduction to the whole book, and its actual 
place is thus sufficiently accounted for, there seems no reason 
for doubting that it was delivered on some special occasion. 
Its date therefore comes in question, and this must be decided 
according as we take verses 7, 8. to describe the actual state of the 
country when the words were uttered, or as prophetic of what it 
would shortly become. If the latter, we could not hesitate to 
refer it to the earliest period of Isaiah's ministry — the reign of 
Jotham, — which every other part of the discourse suits perfectly. 
If the former, it must have been delivered in the reign of Ahaz, 
before he shut up the temple ; or during the Assyrian invasion 
in the time of Hezekiah : and the earlier date would be prefer- 
able, as less opposed to the position in which we find the pro- 
phecy, though it is not, as some commentators suppose, fixed by 
the mention of idolatry in verses 29, 30, 31., for we see from 
chapters xxx. 22., xxxi. 7., that this still co-existed with the 
worship of the true God, in the reign of Hezekiah, as it had in 
those of his predecessors. The doubt cannot be decided by 
the mere grammatical construction of the sentence as it could 
be in English, since the Hebrew prophets habitually use the 
liberty which their language permits, of speaking of future 
events in the present or even past tense. Thus the description 
of the invading army in chap. v. 26., is in the past tense in the 
Hebrew; 'but this,' says Rosenmuller, 'is no reason for doubt- 
ing that Isaiah is speaking of the future ; for in prophecy the 
past or present tense is used instead of the future, in order that 
future events may be contemplated as if present, and may the 
more strongly stir the mind of the hearer, when they are set be- 
fore his eyes by the very form of the discourse.' But the question 
is, whether, in this particular place, the expressions are those of 
the poet and prophet picturing the scene as it rises in vision 
before his imagination, or whether there be something so matter- 
of-fact in them that they must be taken to describe the horrors 
of actual invasion, visible at the very time to the bodily eyes 
of Isaiah and his hearers. There are learned authorities on each 
side, and they have been marshalled in a special treatise by 
* Kimchi in Gesenius. 



16 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



Caspar!* who decides in favour of the earlier date. If I could 
perceive the supposed difference between this and the ordinary 
prophetic style, I should (unless that difference made it impossi- 
ble) still be decided by the external fact — the actual position of 
the discourse — to adopt the same conclusion. But while I 
recognise the thoroughly life-like character of the picture, I 
cannot see that it is more life-like than many which no one 
denies Isaiah to have drawn in imagination ; nor (if I must 
argue the a priori point too) can I admit that Isaiah could have 
been a master of his art, if his imaginative creations could be 
thus positively distinguished from statements of fact. I shall 
have occasion to return to this subject of prophecy, considered 
as a real and intelligible product of the intellectual faculties : 
here I will observe that I believe the present is only the first 
instance — and we shall reach the last, but in the last chapter — 
of that want of thorough apprehension of the phenomenon of 
prophecy, which is at the bottom of many serious critical errors 
of the most opposite kinds. The subject is indeed becoming 
clearer every day ; and the most sceptical commentators have 
abandoned the notion that no prophecy can be rationally ex- 
plained except as a description after the event. And if I sit in 
judgment on much more learned men than myself, when I thus 
say that the present difficulty exists only in their own minds, 
it is not without being well aware that but for them I could 
never have acquired any insight into the subject which I may 
now be turning against them. 

Though we do not adopt Vitringa's date (in the reign of 
Ahaz), we must still agree with him that this discourse is 
fitly placed here as being the most general in its argument 
and application, as well as remarkable for its finished and elegant 
structure, apparently modelled after that great vision of the 
nation's destinies, the Song of Moses. And, perhaps, this 
finished and elegant structure may be taken with some pro- 
priety as itself an indication of the early date of the compo- 
sition. It is the attribute of youth, and especially of youthful 
genius, to embody its newly-budding thoughts and feelings in 
ideals of microcosmic beauty and completeness : but by-and-bye 
the growing and expanding mind finds these ideals of its own 
creation too narrow to express the whole truth of things, and 



YOUTHFUL IDEALS'. HEBREW VERSE. 



17 



abandons them for the larger, though severally less complete, 
forms, which the various realities of the actual world supply, 
and then seeks to find in these a new and better ideal, large as 
the world itself ; — an ideal which is revealed to, rather than 
created by, the human mind ; and the source of which, if we 
will go so far back, we must look for in that which the Athe- 
nian philosophers called the eternal truth and beauty of the 
divine mind, and Hebrew sages the things of the kingdom of 
God. That the marks of such a first youthful ideal are here 
conclusively present I do not venture to assert positively, but 
rather leave the point to the feeling and judgment of the reader; 
but certainly this short chapter may be taken as a very com- 
plete summary and specimen of the chief characteristics — moral, 
political, religious, poetical — of the whole book ; and we may 
find in it the germs of almost all the great principles which 
Isaiah announced and applied to practice during the whole 
period that he exercised the prophetic office. 

Bishop Lowth has the honour of discovering that the pro- 
phets wrote in the same c verse, measure, or rhythm,' as the 
Hebrew poets properly so called ; and we could hardly have a 
better illustration of the fact than in the chapter before us. 
The rhythm of thoughts and images which in Hebrew poetry 
takes the place of the rhythm of syllables and sounds, and 
enables it alone to be translated into other languages, may here 
be studied in its several forms: — line answering to line, and 
word to word ; each bringing out the depth and force of the 
other, sometimes by variation, sometimes by opposition, some- 
times by accumulation, of the corresponding or contrasted 
thoughts; no thought so like the other as to occasion same- 
ness, nor so unlike as to make a discord ; no formal adherence 
to any one rule of parallelism, but a free movement in which 
the poet's inward sense of beauty and order supersedes all formal 
rules ; and a blending and fusing of the several parts into a 
harmony which, with its variety in unity, produces a fulness 
not attainable in any other way. 

Thus in the first paragraph : — 

Hear, 0 heavens, and give ear, 0 earth ; 
For the Lord hath spoken. 

c 



18 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



I have nourished and brought up children, 
And they have rebelled against me. 
The ox knoweth his owner, 
And the ass his master's crib : 
But Israel doth not know, 
My people doth not consider. 

la the first line c heavens' is set against ' earth,' and both 
united in rhythmical opposition to ' the Lord,' the inanimate 
creation to the living God; while 'hear' and 'give ear' in 
like manner correspond with each other and with ' spoken/ 
Then the next six lines are intertwined in a noticeable manner ; 
for not only is there the double correspondence and double con- 
trast of the four last lines among themselves, but the two pre- 
ceding ones (which also balance each other) indirectly involve 
and anticipate the images of the four that follow : — c I ' and 
c me' corresponding and contrasting with 'owner' and 'mas- 
ter,' 'nourisher' with 'crib,' and 'brought up' again with 
'owner/ and 'children' with 'ox' and 'ass;' and the rebel- 
lion of the former with the obedience of the latter : and the 
thoughts are again repeated with a variation and summed up 
in the two last lines. And, finally, those two lines, with that 
taste and judgment with which every true poet (and none more 
than Isaiah) keeps down his imagination, and subordinates the 
parts of his diction to the whole, turn back the mind from 
images to realities, bringing before it the very people of Israel 
and their sin. 

Verses 18, 19, 20. supply us with another instance of very 
beautiful rhythmical construction: — 

Come, now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord : 

Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow ; 
Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool : 
If ye be willing and obedient, 

Ye shall feed on the good of the land ; 
But if ye refuse and rebel, 
The sword shall feed on you : 
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 

First the single introductory line ; then two, corresponding as 
to the lines (yet with the artistic variation in the relative posi- 



RYTHMICAL ORATORY OF THE HEBREWS. 



19 



tions of 'white' and the answering c red'), but with the parts 
of each line contrasting between themselves ; then four lines, 
in which the balance is between the alternate lines, with a con- 
trast of word for word in the first and third, and a play and 
contrast of words and images (which call up, as in a back 
ground, the whole picture both of rural plenty and foreign in- 
vasion) in the second and fourth lines ; and then the single line 
brings the period to a full close, while it answers to its first 
line. How elaborately these lines must have been constructed ! 
What a delicately cultivated and refined sense of beauty in the 
least as well as the greatest matters of the poet's art do they 
evince ! And in this, as in every part of the rhythmic art dis- 
played by Isaiah, there is a soul of poetry inhabiting and ex- 
pressing itself through this beautiful form. 

Yet we must repeat, that the prophet — that Isaiah — is 
not a poet, but a preacher or orator ; his aim is not to de- 
light, but to teach and persuade men : he is not content that 
his hearers should unconsciously receive into their hearts the 
seeds of truth and goodness in the form of beauty, there to take 
root and grow up, night and day, one knows not how ; but he 
labours to impart these by direct indoctrination in all its 
moral methods of reproof, warning, consolation, and instruc- 
tion. There may be no exaggeration in the assertion that 
Isaiah possessed poetic genius of the highest order, and had 
cultivated it with the utmost care ; but it is his servant not his 
master, and he, the patriot and the man of God, habitually 
employs it for the purposes of his own proper vocation. Ewald 
carries out this distinction by printing his translation as prose, 
observing that, though there is no doubt that the form of the 
original is as strictly rhythmical as in the poetical books, there 
are traces in the Hebrew text of these, and none in that of the 
prophets, that they were originally written verse-wise ; and 
that the half-poetical style of the Arabs is always written 
as prose. There is, however, a composite style in Arabic, as in 
Persian and Sanskrit, in which prose and verse are interchanged 
at the writer's discretion, in the form in which Lowth prints 
Chapter vi., and which seems to me to supply a nearer parallel. 
But if we consider that the Hebrew language retained to the 
last its primitive simplicity of construction, and never acquired 

c 2 



20 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



those complex developments of grammar which have fitted the 
classical and modern tongues for elaborate prose composition ; 
and that for this reason, as well as because Hebrew verse was a 
rhythm of sense rather than of sound, the main distinction be- 
tween it and prose must always have been in the tone of thought; 
— we shall find a truer illustration in the rhythmical oratory of 
the Greeks at a period when their political culture, indeed, was 
at a much less advanced stage than that of the Jews in the time 
of Isaiah, but that of the two languages, as instruments of 
thought, apparently not so unequal. ( We must recollect,' says 
Mr. Grote, of this early rhythmical discourse, ' that this was not 
only the whole poetry, but the whole literature of the age : . . . . 
and writing, if beginning to be employed as an aid to a few 
superior men, was at any rate generally unused, and found no 
reading public. The voice was the only communicant, and the ear 
the only recipient, of all those ideas and feelings which produc- 
tive minds in the community found themselves impelled to pour 
out ; both voice and ear being accustomed to a musical recitation 
or chant, apparently something between song and speech, with 
simple rhythm, and a still simpler occasional accompaniment from 
the primitive four-stringed harp.' And again, — e Kallinus 
. . . . employed the elegiac metre for exhortations of warlike 
patriotism ; and the more ample remains which we possess of 
Tyrta3us are sermons in the same strain, preaching to the Spar- 
tans bravery against the foe, and unanimity as well as obedience 
to the law at home. They are patriotic effusions, called forth 
by the circumstances of the time, and sung by single voice, with 
accompaniment of the flute, to those in whose bosoms the flame of 
courage was to be kindled. For though what we peruse is 
verse, we are still in the tide of real and present life, and we 
must suppose ourselves rather listening to an orator addressing 
the citizens, when danger or dissension is actually impending.' * 
The modern Italian improvisatore, too, can utter verse extempore ; 
and such was the rhythm of Grattan's first speech in the English 
House of Commons, that we are told (in Lord Holland's Me- 
moirs) that * Mr. Pitt beat time to the artificial but harmonious 
cadence of his periods.' Even in the actual utterance of their 



* History of Greece, vol. iv. pp. H)0. 110. 



PARALLELS IN OTHER NATIONS. 



21 



discourses the Hebrew prophets must have come very near the 
rhythmical form of their written works : and with whatever mix- 
ture of simple or even rude prose we suppose them to have 
spoken, we see that they afterwards recorded the substance of 
their discourses in literary compositions, which for their careful 
editing may be better compared with Burke's pamphlets, than 
with his merely reported speeches; while their eminently 
poetical thoughts and imagery, as well as diction, may remind 
us of the free blank verse in which Shakspeare idealises 
spoken discourse, as contrasted with the more restricted move- 
ment of Milton or Spenser. And, therefore, as in all trans- 
lations something of the original must be given up for the sake 
of what we keep, I incline to think that the rhythmical printing 
of Lowth and the Paragraph Bible may better represent the 
original to an English reader than that adopted by Ewald.* 

Let us turn to the matter of the prophecy. 

The heavens and earth are constant to the constitution and 
laws imposed on them by their Creator, and to them does God 
appeal against a nation who have ceased to believe in any moral 

* The following passage is to the purpose, whether it supports me or no : 
" My pamphlet .... was composed as for an oration before an assembly, and 
flowed straight from my heart, and hence it must be read like a speech. 
Any one who should read it to himself, or aloud, without modulating his 
voice, in a uniform tone, like a treatise that is merely concerned with ideas, 
would probably be as much puzzled with it as the ordinary reader is 
with Greek orations .... particularly those in Thucydides, before he has 

learnt to read with the ear Most of our authors do not in the 

least know and consider, that the old prose writers wrote as if they were 
speaking to an audience ; whilst among us, prose is invariably written 
for the eye alone, at least only for the ear in the case of an easy nar- 
rative. This is why my style is found so strange and unusual, and hence 
punctuation is so difficult to me, for I ought to have many more signs in 
order to indicate my exact intentions. In fact, with all that the writer com- 
poses as if he were speaking, the character of the movement, and the time, 
ought to be marked, as in music, for the ordinary reader." — Niebuh^s Life 
and Letters, vol. i. I suspect this is the key to the music of our authorised 
English Bible and Prayer Book. It also throws light on the elaborate Ma- 
soretic accentuation, which has undertaken to mark the tone not only of 
words, but of propositions, and so to preserve ' the sense of the thought, the 
internal life of the sentence/ in a dead language. See Ewald's Hebrew 
Grammar, trans, by Nicholson, § 180. ff. 

c 3 



22 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



order or government of the world * : the dullest animals show an 
attachment to their owner's person, and a recognition of his 
manner of caring for them, though he keeps them only for his 
own profit ; but this people disregard and set at nought their 
filial relation to the Lord, though he has chosen them out 
from all mankind to be his own children, bestowed on them 
the peculiar care and love of a father, and by a long education 
qualified them to understand as well as to enjoy the blessings 
of this adoption. They have made themselves like those beasts 
of burden, loading themselves with their iniquities ; so degene- 
rated are they from their true birthright, that they seem to be 
evil in their very stock and breed, like the Canaanites and other 
accursed races f ; — 

They have forsaken the Lord, 
They have despised the Holy One of Israel, 
They are gone away backward. 

* Lowth here quotes Psalm 1. 3, 4., Micah, vi. 1, 2., Deut. xxxii. 1., and 
Deut xxx 19.; and Gesenius Virgil's 

' Esto nunc sol testis, et hsec niihi Terra vocanti,' &c. — 2En. xii. 176. 
To which may be added the appeal of Prometheus, — 
r Q 8?os a/0rj/3, iced TaxvirTepot Trvoal, 
TToraii&v T6 7T7]7a:, ttovt'iwv tc Kv^xaroiV 
avrjpi6fj.ov 7eA.air / u.a, iraixixrirop re yr n 
nal tov ivavoTTT-QV kvkKov yXiov kclXw. 

JEsch. Prom, Vinct. 88. 

And Hamlet's — 

' O all ye host of heaven, O earth ! ' 
All are founded on the same intuitive feeling of the mind, that the works 
and powers of outward nature are an abiding witness for a settled constitution 
and order in the universe, however overlooked or defied. So Wordsworth, 
in his Ode to Duty, — 

' Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strono-.' 
Contrast, too, the pantheistic contusion in the language of the classical 
parallels, with the clear distinction between the world and its Maker, which 
is so clear to the Jew, that he does not so much assert as assume it as an 
axiom impossible to doubt. 

j" Ethnology, while it adds daily to its proofs of the descent of mankind 
from a single stock, also shows clearly the existence of degenerate races, 
which have long lost even the capacity for the nobler human qualities, re- 
ligious, political, and intellectual. Whether it be lost beyond redemption is 
a problem which, in each case, has to be solved by Christianity. No other 
power even attempts the task. See further, on chapter xiv. 28. 



ISAIAH I. 2—8. : POLICY OF UZZIAH. 



23 



Therefore punishment comes upon the sinful nation, and 
punishment severe and repeated enough to rouse it from its ob- 
stinate rebellion : as it is become thoroughly diseased at heart, 
it shall suffer outwardly in proportion to its inward insensi- 
bility ; as there is no soundness, and no desire for soundness 
within, so shall it sink under the repeated strokes of a foreign 
invasion which adds fresh wounds to sores already festering, 
while it longs in vain for a deliverer and a healer. The vision 
of that woe rises before the prophet's eyes, and he sees all the 
national fruits of the long and vigorous reigns of Uzziah and 
Jotham swept away. Uzziah had effectually humbled that old 
and troublesome enemy of Judah, the Philistines, dismantling 
their fortified cities, and establishing his own garrisons in their 
territory : on the opposite side he had reduced the Ammonites 
to their proper condition of tributaries, from which they had 
never lost any opportunity of revolting since David conquered 
them : he had recovered the port of Elath on the Red Sea, 
rebuilt it, and thus, after an interval of about eighty years, 
restored to Judah an important share in the commerce of the 
world : and he had strongly fortified Jerusalem, and organised 
a well armed and disciplined militia, f that went out to war by 
bands,' that so the people might not be taken from the cultiva- 
tion of the land, and other peaceful occupations, except in re- 
gular turns. And while by these means f his name spread 
abroad, even to the entering in of Egypt, for he strengthened 
himself exceedingly,' he was no less active in availing himself of 
the profound peace he had secured abroad to encourage com- 
merce and agriculture at home ; he himself setting an example 
in the latter which his nobles were not slow to follow : ' he 
built towers ' for the protection of his flocks ( in the desert * or 
commons where they pastured, 'and digged many wells; for 
he had much cattle, both in the low country and in the plains ; 
husbandmen also, and vinedressers in the mountains and in 
Carmel ; for he loved husbandry : ' the reopening of the port of 
Elath would not merely have enabled his merchant-ships to 
supply Judah and Jerusalem with the luxuries of Africa and 
India, but would have made Judasa the direct natural highway 
of much of the traffic between those countries and Europe, 
which the Phoenicians carried on by help of trade- caravans, 

c 4 



24 



HEBEEW POLITICS. 



and which would previously have taken a different route; and 
while trade and agriculture thus filled the land with wealth, 
Egypt supplied them with horses and chariots : and what the 
reign of Uzziah had begun, that of Jotham, at the end of half 
a century, was still carrying on. And now the prophet be- 
holds all overthrown, the cities burned, the* cultivated fields 
and the pastures laid waste, and the whole land devoured, 
plundered, and f turned upside down, as is the way in 
foreign invasions'*, while the inhabitants look on, unable 
to resist, and Jerusalem itself, the only remaining hope, i3 
threatened with siege. Then, by one of those transitions 
and combinations with which the imagination can throw a 
gleam of light and beauty over the darkest and most terrific 
picture, and yet at the same time even heighten its truth and 
force, the wasted fields seem to the prophet like the vineyards 
and cucumber gardens at the end of the fruit season, when 
they are indeed stripped and trampled, and desolate-looking, 
yet only because the crops have been gathered in for the benefit 
of the husbandman : and the sole surviving capital stands there 
apparently abandoned by its divine watcher and keeper, like 
the temporary shed which sheltered the keeper of the vineyard 
or garden as long as its fruits could tempt the jackal and the 
fox, and was then left as useless, — yet, inasmuch as it is i like a 
besieged city,' it is garrisoned as well as beleagured, and hope 
remains within, though desolation is without. And then the 
thoughts and images of selfish prosperity and general calamity, 
of national sins and divine judgments, but of a small remnant 
saved through and out of all, assume another form, and recall 
the ancient fate of those cities which were destroyed because 
the Lord could not find ten righteous men therein : — 

Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a small remnant 
We should have been as Sodom, we should have been like unto 
Gomorrah. 

* Grotius quotes — 

" Impius haec tain culta novalia miles habebit ? 
Barbaras has segetes ?" — Virg. Ec. i. 71, 72. 
" England is become the residence of foreigners and the property of 
strangers : at the present time there is no Englishman either earl, bishop, or 
abbot : strangers all, they prey upon the riches and vitals of England ; nor 
is there any hope of a termination of this misery." — William of Malmsbury^ 
ii. 13. 



ISAIAH L 9. : THE LORD OF HOSTS. 



25 



The Lord of hosts, or of armies, is a favourite expression of 
the Hebrew writers, and especially of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ze- 
chariah, and Malachi, by which they recognise Him as the 
universal governor of heaven and earth, 6 who has ordained 
and constituted the services of men and angels in a wonderful 
order : ' — 

' His state 

Is kingly ; thousands at his bidding speed 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest ; 
They also serve who only stand and wait : ' — 

and -who employs His kingly and almighty power to rule the 
nations in righteousness, and, as now, both to punish and to 
save His chosen people. Nor need we be deterred by gram- 
marians from discovering a like depth and beauty of meaning in 
the phrase just before — e the Daughter of Zion,' or doubt that 
to the mind of the prophet and his thoughtful hearers it called 
up the idea of the nation having been brought up by, set apart 
for, and by formal covenant united to, the Lord ; called His 
"bride ; and appointed to show forth, in the constitution, and 
order, and duties, of national society and political life, a new 
and wider manifestation of those laws of God's relation with, 
and government of, man, of which marriage was the first type : 
while the name of Zion would remind them of a city founded 
upon a rock, and that could not be moved — set upon a hill, 
and that could not be hid. 

The sin of Sodom is said (Ezekiel, xvi. 49.) to have been 
pride, fulness of bread, abundance of idleness, and contempt of 
the poor and needy ; their land was one of peculiar fertility, 
and they had given themselves up to a mere life of nature, till 
they wallowed in all the worst sins that break out from such a 
life. National institutions are the proper means of preserving 
a people from, or raising them out of naturalism; but the 
prophet protests that his countrymen were sunk in it, notwith- 
standing their national polity, and their strict maintenance of 
its forms. Though the blasted and submerged site of the cities 
of old was a perpetual witness to the Jews of God's wrath 
against this sensualism — a witness abiding from generation to 
generation in the very midst of them — yet they were as reck- 
less of God's meaning in this thing as the Italians always seem 



26 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



to have been regarding the like destruction of Herculaneum 
and Pompeii. 

The prophet kindling at the thought of his own comparison, 
and feeling how just a one it is, calls on those men — rulers and 
people — who, though professing to administer and obey the 
law of the Lord, were in heart no better than the men of 
Sodom and Gomorrah, to hear what the law of the Lord is in 
spirit and in truth. They still maintain all the external forms 
of religion according to the established ecclesiastical ritual, but 
no inward faith quickens them. This has ever been the great 
abuse of religious forms in all nations and times. Forms there 
must be ; they are a real, vital, part of religion, as the body is 
a real part of the man : but when they lose their life they 
become as worthless and corrupt as a dead body. Tc preserve 
this life is the difficult task : it must be fed direct from heaven 
through a channel which can only be kept open as long, and 
as far, as man consents that his spirit should be raised above 
the routine of nature and the world. And this elevation is so 
irksome to our nature, it is so much pleasanter that morality 
and religion should go on, like digestion, by the unconscious 
working of a mechanical organisation, that men are always 
yielding to the delusion that the thing can be accomplished, — 
from the African or the Buddhist, who multiply their prayers by 
help of a rotary calibash or drum, to the priest of Rome, who 
c makes God' with robings, and genuflexions, and unintelligible 
utterances, and the elevation of a wafer, or the Protestant 
divine with his f Letter of Scripture,' and his Articles which 
are to fasten truth, like an idol, f with nails so that it shall 
not be moved,' and to establish a 4 doctrine and discipline 
from which he will not endure any varying or departing in 
the least degree.' Therefore Isaiah protests in God's name 
that the Law is not in the forms but in the meaning of 
them: sacrifices of bullocks and goats are worthless if they 
are not the symbols of an actual though inward sacrifice of that 
fleshly will which is separating the worshipper from God's 
spiritual presence : the multitudes who throng the courts of the 
temple, and think they are keeping the command to 'appear 
before the Lord,' though their hearts are far away, are but 
treading that command under their feet (as the Hebrew word 



ISAIAH J. 10—27.: NATIONAL BROTHERHOOD. 27 



implies) : oblations which express no sincere thankfulness are 
vain : incense with which no prayer of the heart ascends is an 
abomination : sabbaths and feasts do but mock God when they 
are kept by men who are grinding the faces of the poor with 
unremitted and unrewarded work : the great yearly assemblies 
are worse than idle, types of national brotherhood in the midst 
of universal and habitual oppression and misery. And such a 
national worship and obedience to the law as this, will obtain 
nothing from the Lord in the day of calamity : men may lift 
up their hands in prayer, but in vain, while those hands have 
been so long and deeply stained with blood ; they must wash 
them thoroughly (still alluding to the ecclesiastical ritual), by 
ceasing to do evil, and learning to do well ; they must 

Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, 
Right the fatherless, plead for the widow. 

If they will so reform, and return to true obedience to their 
King and their God, He will himself wash them thoroughly 
from all their iniquity, though it be more deeply ingrained than 
the power of man can reach. The word which our Bible 
translates reason, means also plead or argue in a court of 
justice, as it does in Job, xxiii. 7., and Micah, vi. 2. The con- 
text shows that both ideas must be included; for while the 
whole tone of this prophecy is judicial, arraigning the unjust 
and iniquitous rulers of the Jewish nation before the judgment- 
seat of their invisible King, the reformation, which is the end 
of judgment, is never lost sight of, the fatherly character of the 
Judge is always present, and He reasons with the culprit, and 
is willing to be reasoned with. For He remembers His covenant, 
and is not a God of mere power and wrath, nay, not even of 
mere unbending law, but a living Lord of righteousness and 
love, resolved indeed to maintain absolutely and without in- 
fringement His own holiness, and justice, and truth, yet desiring 
that the most disobedient should still depart from his sin, and 
return and live again under His holy constitution and govern- 
ment, and enjoy the blessings of so doing, loving God, and 
knowing that God loves him : therefore, in the midst of all 
these threat enings, God appeals to the people themselves whe- 
ther He is not reasonable in His conduct towards them. Thus 



28 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the word is at once expressive of the deepest truth and meaning, 
and in accordance with the actual practice of the Hebrew in- 
stitutions, which preserved much of their patriarchal character, 
as all Eastern nations do to this day, even when most corrupt. 

' The faithful city is become a harlot' : — Jerusalem, the 
daughter of Zion, the wife of the Holy One of Israel, has 
broken the bond of her covenant with Him, has set at nought 
the divine constitution and order in which He originally 
placed, and has continued to sustain, her : and, as the outward 
consequence and sign of this spiritual defection, has actually 
fallen to the worship of other Gods. Throughout this prophecy 
Isaiah dwells chiefly on the sins of the princes and rulers of the 
nation, and only incidentally on those of the people ; and ac- 
cordingly, he now dilates on the characteristic vices of the 
former, which are the fruits of their national unfaithfulness. 
Social and political morality have vanished along with religious 
faith ; thieves and murderers are found instead of virtuous 
citizens* ; the nobles and men in authority are the first to break 
the laws they should enforce ; the administration of justice is so 
corrupt that the judges take bribes, connive at the robbers 
whose booty they share, and permit the rich man to pervert 
the law for the oppression of the fatherless and the widow, who 
have no patrons to demand, and no money to buy, justice: 
and thus the aristocracy, setting aside all belief that they hold 
their wealth and power in trust from God, for the benefit of the 
people under them, do but employ these as irresistible engines 
for breaking down all rights that can oppose them in their 
pursuit of luxury and vice. Therefore will the mighty Lord 
of the nation put forth his strength, and purge out these iniqui- 
ties, destroying those who have defied and renounced Him, and 
by means of this severe discipline restoring the nation to its 
former and true character of a people faithful to God, and 
dealing uprightly with each other. { Zion shall be redeemed,' 
through this execution of judgment, and her restored and re- 
formed children shall dwell within her walls in righteousness. 
c Converts' is a cognate word to that in chapter x. 21. 

It may be asked, At what former period of Jewish history 

* The word 'lodging' is suggested by the image of a populous city; 
' silver' by its wealth ; ' wine' by its luxury. 



POLITICAL IDEALS. 



29 



did the nation deserve that character for faith and righteous- 
ness which Isaiah ascribes to it 6 at the beginning ? ' and at what 
subsequent time was it restored to the condition which he pro- 
mises 'afterwards? ' I must reply, — not by pointing back to the 
days of Moses or Samuel, or David, or Solomon, nor forward 
to those of Hezekiah, Josiah, or the Maccabees ; for it could be 
shown that the men who lived at each of those times were 
ready to cry out against their special corruption, — but by refer- 
ence to that universal habit of men's minds to suppose a past 
and hope for a future, realisation in actual life, of their ideals 
of human perfection. Few men, in any time or country, have 
that power of metaphysical abstraction which can enable them 
to contemplate ideals as such ; and even they, when they de- 
scend to practical life, and the practical instruction of the men 
around them, find it necessary to translate their ideas into the 
popular language. The oppressed Saxon prayed for the re- 
storation, by his Norman tyrant, of the laws of Edward, though 
it would have been difficult for him to prove the personal 
merits of that king as a legislator or ruler ; the Long Par- 
liament based all its demands on the ancient rights of the 
Commons ; the French and English Republicans of the last 
century referred to an original social contract ; and in our own 
day the Church of the first centuries and the chivalry of the 
middle ages, supply to considerable classes a local habitation and 
name for their ideals of life, though it would not be easily shown 
that there ever was an adequate historical realisation of any 
one of them. We all feel indeed that there is a fact no less 
than a truth recognised in such language, both as to the past 
and the future. There is a continual progress in the world, 
and every step of it is gained by the triumph of some good over 
some evil, and consequently by some realisation in fact of what, 
till it had so triumphed, could only assert itself in idea. Thus 
the new is always the restoration of the old, and the old the 
promise of the new, and the whole ideal of time is in light, 
though the particular moment as it passes is marked by shadow. 
It will become increasingly apparent as we go on, how important 
an element of the prophetic character and office this belief and 
promise of the realisation of a perfect commonwealth was, and 
in what relation it stands to the search or longing for such a 



30 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



society by the philosophers and philanthropists of other nations 
and times. 

But to return to the detail of the text before us. In the 
judgments and the restoration which the prophet foretells, he 
declares that the people shall learn the worthlessness of the 
idols which they have been worshipping under the oak trees, 
and in the sacred groves. The worship of the c high places ' 
seems to have been partly an adoption of the actual idolatry of 
the neighbouring nations, and partly (2 Chron. xxxiii. 17.) a 
remains of that local worship of the true God, which in some of 
its forms at least (for the obscurity of the subject has been 
already noticed) seems to have become irregular and blameable 
when one central sanctuary had been established for the whole 
people: experience proved that neither pure faith and wor- 
ship, nor national unity, could be preserved but by the para- 
mount — perhaps the sole — recognition of that sanctuary as the 
one house and altar of God ; and when they fell away from this, 
their religion became a religion of nature and not of faith, of 
isolated individuals and not of a church. That this false worship 
was going on in Judaea during the reigns of Uzziah and Jothanb 
at the same time with the temple services, appears from 2 Kings, 
xv. 3, 4., compared with 2 Chron. xxvii. 2.* In that day 
the prophet foretells that these men who have been flourishing 
in their sin, like the oaks, and living in pleasures like those of a 
well- watered garden, shall find that their idols have no power 
to save them from a destruction which shall make them ' as an 
oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water,' — 
images which will be the more forcible if we remember that in 
a southern climate, trees fade rather from excessive heat than 
from seasonable cold, and a garden without water is a mere de- 
sert of sand. Then shall the strong, the mighty, and the unjust 
ruler become tow, and his idols, the work of his hands, a spark ; 
they shall both burn together, and no man shall quench them. 

Inverse 29, is an instance of what seemed to Lowth's classical 
taste a corrupt reading : 6 They shall be ashamed of the oaks 
which ye have desired.' But this variation of the persons of 

* For allusions to the subject at other times, see Deut. xvi. 21., 1 Kings, 
xiv. 23., 2 Kings, xvi. 4., 2 Chron. xxviii. 4., Ezekiel, vi. 13. 



LANGUAGE A KEY TO NATIONAL CHARACTER. 31 



the verb is not unusual in Hebrew, and certainly no cor- 
ruption. Nay if we look at Psalm xci., which is very artisti- 
cally constructed, we shall see reason to think that what jars so 
harshly on a classically trained ear was a beauty to the Hebrew 
poets. I dwell the more upon these peculiarities of idiom and 
composition, because I believe that we cannot understand the 
higher and deeper meaning of Isaiah, any more than we can of 
Shakspeare, unless our minds are emancipated from servile ad- 
herence to classical rules. Each language and literature has its 
own laws, and these are derived from and connected with a dis- 
tinctive national mind, which expresses itself in its own way 
through the great writers of each nation : and thus language be- 
comes a key to national character. 



32 HEBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER III. 

ISAIAH, II. III. IV. HEBREW GENIUS IMAGINATIVE RATHER THAN LOGICAL. 

PRETERITE AND FUTURE TENSES IN HEBREW. THE LAST DAYS. CON- 
TRAST OF THE IDEAL AND ACTUAL STATE OF THE NATION. FOREIGN 

INFLUENCES. PRIVATE IDOLATRY. POLITICAL MATERIALISM. — NATIONAL 

DECAY. — LAWS OF GOD's GOVERNMENT OF THE WORLD. — GOOD AND EVIL 
OF COMMERCE. HEBREW MATRONS. FEMALE LUXURY ITS PUNISH- 
MENT. THE BRANCH OF THE LORD. THE RESTORED THOUGH HUMBLED 

NATION. 

The next discourse, consisting of chapters ii. iii. iv., is en- 
titled, e The Word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw concerning 
Judah and Jerusalem.' The propriety of applying the phrase 
6 saw ' to 6 the Word ' is apparent, if we refer ourselves to 
the mental process which takes place in meditating upon any 
important truth, especially while the vividness of the first dis- 
covery lasts ; and still more is it obvious, as we read the dis- 
course itself, and look for ourselves at its various pictures of 
military power, maritime commerce, wealth, luxury, pride, sel- 
fishness, and irreligion. 

No arguments need be added to prove that the prophecy de- 
picts the state of society in the period between the latter end of 
the reign of Uzziah, and the beginning of that of Ahaz. 

The opening paragraph — a passage of aphoristic complete- 
ness and beauty, and here serving as a text to the subsequent 
discourse — is found also, with a few verbal alterations, in Isaiah's 
cotemporary, Micah (chap. iv. 1 — 3.). Conjecture has variously 
attributed it to each of these prophets, and to some older one, 
copied by both : the last seems the most probable supposition. 

If we keep the verbs in the tenses which they have in the 
Hebrew, the passage will stand thus : — 

And it hath come to pass in the last days, 

That the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the 
head of the mountains, 



ISAIAH II. 1—4.: HEBREW PAST AND FUTURE. 33 



And exalted above the hills ; 

And all nations have flowed unto it. 

And many peoples have gone and said, 

Come ye, and we will go up to the mountain of the Lord, 

To the house of the God of Jacob; 

And He will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths : 

For out of Zion shall go forth the law, 

And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 

And he hath judged between the nations, 

And hath arbitrated for many peoples : 

And they have beat their swords into ploughshares, 

And their spears into pruninghooks : 

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 

Neither shall they learn war any more. 

This — at first sight and to our notions — singular use of the 
tenses is thoroughly discussed by the grammarians ; yet in their 
translations even Gesenius and Ewald obliterate all traces of it, 
usually substituting the present for both past and future. If 
the German idiom peremptorily requires this, Professor Alexan- 
der has shown, in his notes on the latter chapters of Isaiah, that 
no such entire sacrifice is demanded by the English ; but that 
very frequently an adherence to the original distinction of 
tenses gives a beauty as well as force to the passage, which 
leaves little doubt that we shall one day see it naturalized to a 
great extent in our English Bibles. The explanation of the 
Hebrew usage, in as far as this is the place for considering it, is 
clearly that the structure of such a passage as that before us is 
imaginative, not logical — a picture, not a statement. The speaker 
completely projects himself into e the last days ; ' he is there, he 
finds them come ; he looks about him to see what is actually in 
process, and sees that the mountain of the Lord's house is about 
to be — still in process of being — established at the head of the 
mountains ; he looks again, and the nations have already arrived 
at the place prepared for them, yet so freshly that they are still 
calling one another on ; and as they come up they find that the 
King they seek is already there, and has effected some of his 
arbitrations and decisions before they arrive for their turn. 

So thoroughly does this imaginativeness pervade the language 
not only of the prophets but of the historians, so habitually has 

D 



34 



HEBKEW TOLITICS. 



the imaginative and not (as with us) the logical faculty dictated 
the laws of Hebrew grammar, that the form ( and it hath come 
to pass' in the first line, * refers always to a future event;' 
while that of 6 shall be' in the second, is usually equivalent to 
the sysvsro of historical narration.* There seems indeed a spe- 
cial idiom as to this verb : and the subject is still more clearly 
explained in the general rule f that in continued narrations of 
the past, only the first verb stands in the preterite, the others 
being in the future form ; and on the contrary, in continued 
descriptions of the future, the first verb is in the future, while 
the rest are in the preterite form. Thus in Genesis i. 1. : — 
In the beginning God created (pret.) the heavens and the earth : 
And God ivill say (fut.) 'Let there he light, and there icill be (fut.) 
light : And God icill see, Sfc. And just the reverse in Isaiah 
vii. 17. ff. : — Jehovah will bring (fut.) upon thee and upon thy 
people, days such as have not come since, Sfc. And it hath (pret.) 
happened on that day . . . And they have (pret.) cornel 'f In both 
these examples the speaker evidently places himself in the 
midst of the events themselves, describing the past creation as it 
would have been seen by that eye that c was there or ever 
the earth was, while as yet He had not made the land nor the 
fields and picturing the future as Ahaz would realise it after 
it had become the past. 

Nor is it only in the Hebrew language and its grammar, that 
this characteristic appears : it pervades the whole genius of the 
nation, the structure and growth of their laws and institutions, 
and the acts and habits of their legislators and statesmen, as 
well as the writings of their poets and historians : they are c of 
imagination all compact ;' a very ' nation of prophets ; ' the 
future is their goal, and their appointed rest, to which they 
press fonvard as travellers through the mere actual and present. 
It may be difficult for an Englishman, or German, in our nine- 
teenth century, to realise this state and habit of mind ; but it 
is a difficulty somewhat analogous to that which we find in 
realising the state of mind which produced the Greek mytho- 

* Gesenius, Lexicon, word HS""!. 

' ' T T 

f Gesenius, Grammar, § 48 b. English edition of Bagster, 1852. 
% Proverbs, viii. 22—30. The whole passage bears on this point in a 
noticeable manner. 



ANCIENT AND MODERN HABITS OF MIND. 35 



logy *, and which also, in another way, was so highly imaginative, 
that in the present stage of the human race, and the now pre- 
dominating development of the reasoning faculties, we have no 
corresponding inward experience. Yet the faculty of imagina- 
tion still exists in us ; and if we carefully study its character 
and workings in our own minds, and in the writings of the 
poets of our own, and of other times ; if we meditate upon 
the distinctive features of the Hebrew mind, literature, language, 
and institutions, in their action and reaction upon each other, 
and as they correspond with, or differ from those of other na- 
tions ; if we consider that there is a growth (with its consequent 
losses as well as gains) of the human race, no less than of its 
several families and individual men j~ ; if, lastly, we believe that 

* " But how can we arrive at an idea of its (the My thus) real nature and 
import? Such an idea cannot be attained d priori, as we have it only from 
experience ; neither is it immediately, and of itself, intelligible, being utterly 
unknown as a product of our times. It is a purely historical idea ; an idea, 
moreover, by which a creation of very remote times is to be conceived. It 
cannot possibly be arrived at otherwise than historically. But how is its 
historical perception possible, the my thus itself being the only source of the 
idea of the mythus, and appearing, too, in a form different from its contents ? 
In the statement of an historical fact the form and the contents correspond ; 
an acquaintance with the language forms the bridge which leads from one to 
the other. But here they lie further apart, and the path must first be 
sought, is itself a problem. In other words, mythi must be interpreted, 
must be explained, ere we can attain a knowledge of their contents. This 
must be done in a thousand individual instances ere we shall be able to 
seize the essence of the mythus as a generic idea. And then the question 
still remains, whether we can express the knowledge thus attained by an 
idea such as passes current amongst us, or by a simple combination of such 
ideas ; whether we do not find something compounded, according to our 
notions, of multifarious, widely separated, and heterogeneous materials, the 
union of which is based on a mode of thinking entirely different from ours." 
Midler s Scientific Mythology, translated by Leitch, p. 6. 

f Mythology has supplied us with one instance, Language furnishes another. 
" It may be observed as a general fact," says Dr. Pritchard, " that Lan- 
guages appear to have become more permanent as we come down towards 
later times. During the last ten, or perhaps the last fifteen centuries, they 
have undergone few alterations except through the effect of conquest, or the 
intermixture of nations. The Bretons .... are still easily intelligible to 
the natives of Wales. . . . The Scots who emigrated from the north of Ire- 
land to Argyleshire can still converse with the natives of Ireland. 

Languages, by intermixture of nations, become disintegrated ; they lose parfc 

» 2 



36 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



these characteristics of the Hebrew mind were providentially so 
heightened, adapted, and directed by the influence of political 
institutions, and local and historical circumstances, as that men 
chosen out of this nation might, without any violent, arbitrary, 
or in any way monstrous, subversion of their human nature and 
faculties, be made the fit instruments of God's revelation of 
Himself to men : — then we shall perhaps find that there is a 
rational and intelligible idea of prophecy attainable by us; and 
that in proportion as we realise it, it will make clear the dark 
and difficult places in the prophetical Scriptures, and deliver 
us from the fear of having to choose between interpretations 
fairly obnoxious to the charge of introducing the doctrines of 
superstition, and even magic, into religion, and those of a sceptical 
criticism, which is often as regardless of historical and literal fact 
as of true philosophy and Christian faith. 

Isaiah then, 6 rapt into future times,' sees the throne of the 
Lord of Israel established in sovereignty over all the nations of 
the earth, and they becoming willing subjects to Him, and 
friendly fellow citizens to each other. The nations attain to 
true liberty, for they come to submit themselves to the righteous 
laws and institutions, and to the wise and gracious word and 
direction, of that King whose service is perfect freedom ; and to 
true brotherhood, for they leave their old enmities and conflicts, 
and make the same Lord is their judge, and umpire, and reconciler. 
And all this, not by some newly invented device of the nations^ 

of their grammatical modifications. ... In the mean time no new forms of 
human speech are produced : no new varieties of inflection expressive of the 
modification of ideas by changes in the endings or the initial syllables of 
words are ever attempted ; particles and auxiliaries are inserted to supply 
the want of obsolete inflections. Formations of language and the develop- 
ment of grammatical systems have long ceased. As in geology, we now only 
witness the disintegration of what the first ages produced. How different 
was the habit of the human mind with regard to language in the age when 
the Sanskrit, the Greek, the Latin, and the Maaso-Goihic, idioms were de- 
veloped from one common original ! " — Researches into the Physical Hist, of 
Mankind, ii. 221, 222. The whole paragraph is most interesting, as show- 
ing man's original powers of language-making, and their gradual cessation. 

The practice of sacrifice by all the nations of antiquity, with its aban- 
donment by those of Christendom, as also by the Mahometans, is another of 
the changes in kind, and not merely in degree, of a large part of the human 
race. In such facts as these, the student of a constructive historical phi- 



isaiah ir. 5 — 9.: true and false philanthropy. 37 



some new result of their own civilisation, but by the carrying 
out of the old original purpose and plan of God, that His 
chosen people of the Jews should be the ministers of these good 
things, and that in them should all nations of the earth be 
blessed, — that 'out of Zion should go forth the law, and the 
word of the Lord from Jerusalem.' This is the vocation of the 
Hebrew people. This, says the prophet, is the key to all our 
duties as a nation, this is the master-light to guide us to right 
action: — 'O house of Israel, come ye, and let us walk in the 
light of the Lord.' 

The appeal is in vain. The house of Israel is, indeed, willing 
enough for, and is already practising, a universal brotherhood of 
nations, but quite of another fashion from this. They have 
filled themselves to repletion with the idolatries and divinations 
of the Syrians, Chaldseans, and Philistines; and on every side 
have joined themselves to the heathens by marriages, political 
alliances, commercial intercourse, and adoption of religious rites. 
Juventutem studiis externis degenerare, was the complaint of 
the Romans who were still faithful to the ancient discipline, in 
the time of Nero*; and even in our own Christian times, 
and among Christian nations, these are great causes of na- 
tional deterioration : and Moses and the prophets are proved 
by the result to have judged rightly, that nothing but the strict 
exclusion of such foreign influences could preserve the moral, 
political, and religious nationality of their country. I would 
urge the thoughtful consideration of these verses (2 — 9.) on any 
one who is perplexed by the confident assertion of writers who 
prefer vague declamation to close investigation and reasoning, 
that the Hebrew prophets were actuated by a bitter hatred of 
foreigners. He will, I think, discover (from this and such like 
study) that they were possessed by views and hopes of a phi- 
lanthropy which even our own times have not been able to ex- 
tend : they yearned for fellowship with all men, under the only 
conditions in which fellowship is possible : they longed for an 
universal communion of virtue, humanity, and goodness, and 

losophy patiently seeks the key to many a difficulty in Jewish as well as 
other ancient history, which the merely destructive critic gets rid of by a re° 
ference to the standard of his own times and country. 
* Tacit. Ann. xiv. 20. quoted by Vitringa. 

d 3 



38 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



could not be content to have a general licence of vice, brutality, 
and wickedness instead; and they advocated what they saw, 
and what all history has proved, to be the only way of avoiding 
the one and securing the other. 

For the like reasons Moses had forbidden, and Isaiah here 
proceeds (no doubt with a reference to the law of Moses) to 
censure, the accumulation of wealth, and the multiplying horses 
and chariots. The nation had come to the state from which 
Moses would have kept it back if possible : it was rich, luxu- 
rious, and put its trust in the physical force of its standing 
army, and meanwhile had forgotten its divine King, and the 
covenant between them. And therefore the land had become 
' full of idols.' It has been noticed that these were doubtless 
worshipped in many groves and high places during the reigns of 
Uzziah and Jotham, though these kings formally upheld the 
national worship of the true God ; but we may (with Vitringa) 
especially refer this passage to the Teraphim, the Penates or 
Lares ( which they made each one for himself to worship,' and 
to divine with, in their own houses ;— a species of idolatry which 
from the earliest times is found among those who yet professed 
the worship of the Lord. The whole ecclesiastical scheme of 
the Hebrew polity tended to elevate the members of the nation 
out of a selfish state, and bring them to a consciousness of the 
dignity and virtue of being f members one of another ;' while 
the effect of this private superstition, which had filled the land 
with idols, must have been the exact contrary. So many gods, 
so many centres of social attraction and repulsion. A state of 
things in which every man has his own god in his own house, is 
mere naturalism, Sham man ism, or Fetish-worship, and engenders 
the horde-life, into which family or patriarchal life sinks, if not 
comprehended in and upheld by national institutions, and espe- 
cially a national worship. The bond of political society in 
Greece, or in Rome, was the national recognition of Apollo or 
Pallas, Jupiter or Mars. And if faith was thus potent as long 
as it remained sincere, though its objects were imaginary, not 
less was it necessary to the people whose God was the Lord. 
But since they have forsaken Him, in the office to which He 
had appointed them among the nations, the prophet declares 
that the Lord too hath forsaken them, and will not forgive them. 



ISAIAH II. 10—22.: DAYS OF JUDGMENT 



39 



The Lord hath forsaken them as their father and friend, 
but He comes to call them to account as their judge. Men of 
every rank, high and low, have been humbling themselves every- 
where before their idols ; they shall now be compelled to bow 
down before the Lord, for all their haughtiness. The day of 
the Lord of Hosts is at hand; — that crisis or ( day of judg- 
ment,' in which He who upholds and directs the universe and 
its inhabitants by righteous laws and administration, executes on 
the impenitent breakers of those laws the sentence which He 
has pronounced against them. The Flood, the destruction of 
Sodom, the invasion of Judaea in the reigns of Ahaz and Heze- 
kiah, the taking of J erusalem by Nebuchadnezzar or by Titus, 
and the like national crises in ancient and in modern history, 
are all c Days of the Lord,' in which He comes to judge the 
earth ; and partial anticipations of the last judgment of the 
world. Their wealth and rank shall not save them : though 
they tower above their fellows, as the cedars of Lebanon and 
the oaks of Basan (of which they build their palaces) tower 
above the common shrubs ; though they stand like their native 
mountains, and like the fortifications which they have added to 
those mountains in defiance of all invaders ; though they are 
prepared to resist the storms of fortune like the great merchant 
ships by which they have amassed their wealth, and though 
their dissolute idol-worship sanctions all the sensual luxury of 
their life * ; yet all shall be brought down to the dust. They 
shall vainly seek to escape, as unarmed peasants or women fly 
into the nearest cave or hole when they hear the hoofs of some 
plundering tribe of Edom or Ishmael from the desert: but the 
judgment of the Lord shall reach them, as the earthquake 
(then, as now, not uncommon in Judaea) would bring down the 
rock on him who sought refuge in it. And as such fugitives 
carry in their hands their most precious goods, but are glad in 
their extremity to abandon these to the moles and bats of the 
caves, that they may more freely use their hands in clambering 

* This seems the best explanation of 1 images of desire.' Compare chap- 
ters i. 29., xliv. 9. with Genesis, iii. 6. ; Levit. xxvi. 1.; Numb, xxxiii. 52. 
The phrase ' ships of Tarshish' (Tartessus in Spain), applied to merchant- 
ships which could only have traded in the south, is exactly like our usage of 
' China cups,' ' Japan trays,' &c. 

d 4 



40 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



into the safest recesses, so the idolatrous nation shall be obliged 
to abandon its false gods. Such is man, when his trust is in 
idols, and when the Lord is not upholding, but opposing, him. 

The prophet now proceeds to tell, in literal and detailed lan- 
guage, of the national calamities he has just before described 
metaphorically ; and to declare the worthlessness of man's po- 
litical devices to stay the ruin. At the time Isaiah spoke, 
the nation, and its capital city and seat of government, might 
seem to the worldly-wise too firmly established to fear the 
wrath, or need the help, of a God, whom they had forgotten as a 
dream among the realities of life. The fortified frontiers and 
the standing army might not have been tested for some time, 
but doubtless they were as invincible as in the days of the 
great Uzziah; and Judah's power was not merely in its army, 
but still more in its civilisation, in its system of laws, its reli- 
gious and political culture, its statesmen versed in affairs, its 
feudal aristocracy, its ranks and dignities, its manufacturing 
skill and industry, and its eloquent oratory. How could such a 
state be in any danger? So argued the shrewd man of the 
world in Isaiah's day, just as he still does in our own. He could 
not see that the soldiers were a set of machines incapable of 
standing against an invasion of men full of fierce life ; that the 
law was so administered as to be an engine of oppression instead 
of justice; that the prophets, the teachers of the people, em- 
ployed their gifts and opportunities of teaching — just as the 
orators and advocates did theirs — to prove good to be evil and 
evil good, to justify prosperous wickedness, and to undermine all 
faith in moral and political righteousness. But Isaiah foresees 
that a slight irregularity in the working of this vast machinery 
of imposture will throw the whole into confusion. It may hold 
together for the life of the present king (though even his ma- 
tured state-craft had no doubt done more than it could hope to 
do again), but the life and death of rulers are among the events 
which God retains in His own power ; and when the weak and 
worthless boy Ahaz sits on the throne of his fathers — when 
God gives a child to be their prince and a babe to rule over 
them, it will be seen what their boasted order of society is 
worth.* The sovereign authority having fallen into powerless 

* " Fire and slaughter raged on all sides. The country [i^ormaridy during 



ISAIAH III. 1 — 15.: ETERNAL LAWS OF JUSTICE. 41 



hands, there will be nothing to restrain the strong man from 
exercising his pleasure against his weaker neighbour, and espe- 
cially nothing to restrain the refuse of society from rising against 
the refined classes. Foreign invasion shall take advantage of 
this internal disorder, and the heads of tribes and families, the 
centres of Jewish political life, being killed, or carried into cap- 
tivity, there will be a general dissolution of society ; and when, 
under the sense of this calamity a man shall try and restore 
order and unity by calling on his elder brother — on whom de- 
volve the rights and duties of the absent father — to take up his 
position as that father's representative, and to become a ' healer ' 
of the 6 ruin,' then will he refuse with the selfishness of despair, 
declaring that the ruin is too great to be repaired, and that he 
himself is too much sunk under it even to make the attempt.* 
How the men who heard these words of Isaiah experienced their 
truth a few years after, we learn from 2 Chron. xxviii., xxix. 
6 — 9, Again were these judgments executed on arepetition of the 
offences in the reign of Manasseh ; and again far more heavily 
in the days of Jeremiah, whose Prophecy and Lamentations de- 
scribe the famine ; the loss of all who could have given aid by 
vision, counsel, or the sword ; the imbecility of the king, who 
dared not rule according to the dictates of his own conscience 
or judgment, but himself avowed that ' the king was not he who 
could do anything against' the people about him; the tyranny 
of the great men during these calamities ; and the general de- 
pravity and dissolution of all moral and political order. If we 
compare the prophecy and history of the one period with those 
of the other, and both with like periods in the history of other 
nations (as, for instance, before the French or English Revolu- 
tions), we shall see clearly how the prophets announced the 
eternal and immutable laws of God's government of the world, 
to be again and again brought into operation, and accomplished, 
in the events of successive ages. 

the minority of William the Conqueror], formerly most flourishing, was now 
torn with intestine broils, and divided at the pleasure of the plunderers ; so 
that it was justly entitled to proclaim, ' Woe to the land whose sovereign is 
a child.'" — William of Malmsbury, iii. 

* Compare the corresponding state of the kingdom of Samaria, at the 
period; Isaiah, ix. 17—20.; Hosea, vii. 1—7. 



42 



HEBEEW POLITICS. 



The prophet will not for a moment lose sight of the moral 
character of these national calamities ; each fresh prediction of 
them is followed by the declaration that they are e the fruit of 
their doings/ ( the reward of their hands : ' — 

Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen, 

Because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, 

To provoke the eyes of His glory ; 

The show of their countenance is against them ; 

And they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. 

The selfish aristocracy have abandoned all their proper — 
patriarchal and paternal— -duties to their people, for the one 
business of wringing from them the means of unbounded luxury. 
This was a consequence of the commercial spirit entirely ab- 
sorbing the aristocratic or patriarchal element which ought to 
have limited and purified it. Commerce is perhaps one of the 
most dangerous, as well as one of the most important, of na- 
tional developments. Its good is as real as its evil; it is, in 
many obvious respects, a far better source and occasion for 
national and international activity than its only substitute, 
war : but the thoughtful student of history and politics does not 
need to be told that even war has sometimes proved more 
humanising than commerce; and still less, that the latter as 
certainly as the former turns to mere corruption and political 
degeneracy, if it be not duly balanced by other elements of 
national life.* And if modern philosophy is right in considering 
that each of the nations of antiquity was fitted to exhibit the 
separate working of one or two of the more elementary laws of 
politics, but not to afford a field for those vast and complicated 

* "The philosophical thinkers on politics," says Mr. Grote, "conceived (and 
to a great degree justly, as I shall show hereafter), that the conditions of 
security in the ancient world imposed upon the citizens generally the abso- 
lute necessity of keeping up a military spirit and willingness to brave at all 
times personal hardship and discomfort ; so that increase of wealth, on ac- 
count of the habits of self-indulgence which it commonly introduces, was 
regarded by them with more or less of disfavour." — History of Greece, iii. 
151. And again : — " There was a considerable body of ancient sentiment, 
and that, too, among high-minded and intelligent men, which regarded gold 
and silver as a cause of mischief and corruption, and of which the stanza of 
Horace (Od. in. iii. 49.) is an echo—' Aurum irrepertum,' &c." — Ibid. ix. 320, 



ISAIAH III. 16 — 26.: LUXURY OF THE HEBREW LADIES. 43 



problems which modern societies have to solve, then was Moses 
right in making laws to discourage the money-making spirit 
and practice of which the results would be such as Isaiah here 
denounces ; results quite preclusive of the effectual development 
of that idea which it was the very end of the existence of the 
Hebrew polity to develope. 

Connected with the grasping, money-loving spirit of the 
great and rich men, is that of pampered luxury in the women. 
The nobleman has substituted mere greedy blood-sucking with 
the forms of law for a kind paternal care and guidance of his 
dependants ; and the lady has turned that feminine delicacy 
and gentleness which she should have employed in refining and 
humanising the relations of domestic life, and thence spreading 
its influence throughout society, into haughty exclusiveness and 
a love of dress and luxury, gradually degenerating to sensuality 
and licentiousness. 

It always seems to me that Isaiah marks the fact of the 
social importance of the Hebrew women (which we otherwise 
know to have been so much more like that of the Roman than 
the Greek matron), and his own mournful though indignant 
sense of what high dignity and duty they had abandoned, in the 
prominence which he gives to the subject, by the elaborate de- 
scription of the luxury of the daughters of Zion. How graphic 
he is ! We see before us the Jewish ladies, ( walking and 
mincing as they go,' with haughtily tossed head, and wanton 
eyes, and hear the tinkling of the mimic fetters of gold with 
which their ankles are encircled : they wear the fine white linen 
of Egypt, and their long robes are rich with embroidery ; the 
turban shows its wearer's taste, or the open network the beauty 
of her hair; the large veil, the ancient dress of the modest 
Hebrew woman of every rank, is now adjusted in the bold 
fashion of the day, or superseded by the lighter mantilla of lace 
or gauze thrown so gracefully over the head and shoulders; 
each fair face glistens with ear-drops and nose-jewels ; from the 
chains about each slender neck hang the ornamental crescent, 
the amulet with its magical characters graven on the gem, the 
little mirror, or the scent-box ; or we notice another capricious 
fashion, where a purse is fastened to the broad girdle of silk 
embroidered with gold, and the mirror is carried in a hand 



44 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



loaded with bracelets and rings. We turn to look again, and 
the squalid filth and disease of poverty and the prison are 
before us : — 

Instead of perfume there is stench ; 

And instead of a girdle, a rent ; 

And instead of well-set hair, baldness ; 

And instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth ; 

And branding instead of beauty. 

The prophet seems to answer (in verse 25.) the incredulous 
question, How can this ever be; what danger is there of its 
befalling us ? As though he had said, You are living in utter 
wordliness and selfishness, in the neglect of all relationships, 
and you shall feel what it is to be stripped of them all, by your 
husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers falling in battle; — that you 
may know what you are out of the order in which God has 
placed you, and which you have renounced. When your fore- 
heads are scarred by the slave-master's brand, when your rich 
apparel has but insured its stripping by your ruthless captors, 
and when the sun beats on your heads, and you sink with 
hunger, thirst, weariness, and degradation, while driven naked 
and like herds of cattle in the train of the conquerors who have 
laid waste your homes, — then you shall know that it is the 
Lord who e hath smitten the crown of the head of the daughters 
of Zion, and discovered their shame.' 

Then he turns abruptly from the daughters, to the Daughter, 
of Zion, gathering them together in their proper representative, 
the licentious and rebellious nation, the faithless bride of the 
Holy One of Israel. He employs no arguments to prove the 
connection between the selfish luxury of the women and the 
decay of public virtue : their consciences cannot deny that their 
sin is both a cause and an effect of the national unrighteousness, 
and to their conscience he appeals direct, by simply announcing 
the impending judgment : — 

Thy men shall fall by the sword, 
And thy mighty in the war — * 

and the gates of Jerusalem, the places of resort for business 

* See further as to the treatment of captives in war, on Isaiah, xx. 



ISAIAH IV. 1. : THE WIDOWED MATRON". 



45 



or for pleasure, which now resound with the cheerful hum of 
prosperous throngs, shall echo with the voice of the bereaved, 
the destitute, or the captive, filling the air (as the manner of 
eastern nations was and is) with their wailings ; and She, the 
widowed and childless City, shall sit upon the ground, as 
mourners used to sit, and as she was represented 800 years 
afterwards (and may still be seen), on the medals of her con- 
querors, Vespasian and Titus. 

And in that day, when the youth of the land are everywhere 
cut off, 

Seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, 

We will eat our own bread, 

And wear our own apparel ; 

Only let us be called by thy name,— 

Take thou away our reproach.* 

The Jewess, like the ancient Roman, or modern English, 
woman, was called by her husband's name ; and she prized the 
honour of wedlock, and dreaded the reproach of childlessness, at 
least as much as either of these ; but we must contrast the 
dignified expression of these feelings by Sarah, Hannah, and 
Elizabeth, nay, even that of the jealous and petulant Rachel, 
with the exhibition which the Prophet now contemplates in his 
mind's eye, in order to see the picture of social disorganisation 
which he sees. If a harem of wives and concubines was still a 
part of the king's state in Isaiah's time, though I know no rea- 
son for thinking it was, it is quite improbable that polygamy 
was the common custom of the nation, or that they had not long 
passed out of the half-civilised condition and habits for which 
Moses had provided, in his laws for the protection of the female 
slaves whom a man might take at the same time for his wives : 
but now Isaiah says that these women, whose luxury and pride 
he has just described, will abandon even the natural reserve of 
their sex, and not only force themselves several upon one man, 
but declare that they will be content to share with each other 
a legalised concubinage, in which they will not claim the con- 

* Grotius quotes Lucan (Pharsal. ii. 342.) : — 

' ... da tantum nomen inane 
Connubii ; liceat tumulo scripsisse, Catonis 
Marcia.' 



46 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



cubine's ancient right of bread and apparel, which, the old law 
(Exod. xxi. 10.) had, in express terms, secured to her. It need 
not be supposed that Isaiah anticipated the literal fulfilment of his 
words ; we shall probably understand him better by taking this 
as an instance of that poetic or rhetorical hyperbole, which he 
so delights to use for the more forcible expression of his moral 
and political teaching. The mystery which some commentators 
have seen in the numbers seven and one in this passage, and 
which is even said to have occasioned the separation of this 
portion of the prophecy into a distinct chapter, perhaps makes 
worth while the obvious remark, that it is nothing more than 
the wide-spread idiom of modern as well as ancient languages, 
by which a definite or round number is put for an indefinite. 
Seven is thus generally used by the Hebrews for any consider- 
able number, as it was among the Egyptians and Persians, and 
is still said to be in the East. The Moguls are said to employ 
nine in like manner. So in English we put five, or ten, for any 
small, and a hundred for a large, number, in conversation ; 
though the genius of our language forbids such idioms in graver 
discourse. 

In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious, 
And the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely, 
For them that are escaped of Israel. 

Some commentators refer these words ( branch of the 
Lord,' and c fruit of the earth,' merely to the restored and 
reformed nation, but there seems greater propriety in the ex- 
planation of those who see in c the branch of the Lord' an 
allusion to more than this. I think that if we only contrasted 
the passage with such declarations as, — 

' I will restore thy judges as at the first, 
And thy counsellors as at the beginning : 
Afterwards thou shalt be called, 
The city of righteousness, the faithful city : 
Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, 
And her converts with righteousness' (chap. i., 26., 27.) ; — 

or, 

' The remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah, 
Shall again take root downward, 
And bear fruit upward' (chap, xxxvii. 31.) 



ISAIAH IV. 2 — 6. : MASTER-THOUGHT OF ALL PROPHECY. 47 



we might perhaps suspect some allusion to a personal deliverer 
and ruler in the one, which is wanting in the others : and we 
might find a probable explanation of this image of the branch, 
by comparing it with Isaiah's subsequent, — 

' There shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse> 
And a Branch shall grow out of his roots,' &c. (chap. xi. 1.) ;— - 

with Jeremiah's — 

e Behold the days come, saith the Lord, 
That I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, 
And a king shall reign and prosper, 

And shall execute justice and judgment, &c.' (chap, xxiii. 5.);-— 
and with ZechariahV — 

' Behold the man whose name is the Branch : 
And he shall grow up out of his place, 
And he shall build the temple of the Lord, 
And he shall bear the glory,' &c. (chap. vi. 12.) 

But we have a fuller, more philosophical light, to aid this 
verbal criticism. We find traces in all the earlier records of 
the Hebrew faith and history, of the expectation of an incarnate 
representative of the invisible Lord God of Israel; we see 
how it gradually becomes to Isaiah (as I hope the following 
pages will help to show at large), and to his cotemporaries and 
successors, the master-thought and light of their faith and 
teaching, to which they hold fast, though their individual anti- 
cipations of the manner of its fulfilment are again and again 
baffled, when the event shows that a Hezekiah, or Zerubbabel, 
or son of Josedech, is not the Branch ; and, lastly, we know 
when and how this expectation of Israel for themselves and 
mankind has been fulfilled in God's manner. And thus (if I 
may use the correct, though perhaps pedantic, phrase), we can 
explain the particular fact by the universal law, and recognise 
in the words before us an early dawning, in or to the mind of 
Isaiah himself, of the great idea of all prophecy. 

Then follows the description of the restored and the reformed, 
though humbled and diminished, nation. It is a common ob- 
servation, verified alike in great national calamities and in 
ordinary pauperism, that misery of itself tends to make men 



48 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



more vicious ; and accordingly it is not a mere judgment and 
execution on the bloody men and sensual women of Jerusalem 
that Isaiah foretells, but a moral purification of the nation, 
wrought by the Lord, and by his spirit, through these means. 
Their sin had alike infected their family and their political life ; 
but now a new and holy spirit shall be revived in every house- 
hold, and in the 'assemblies' of the citizens whether meeting at 
the temple worship or the preaching of a prophet*, at the eccle- 
siastical feasts or national fairs, at the tribunals of the king or 
the judges sitting in the gate, or on other occasions when they 
seem to have had a real (though according to modern European 
notions, irregular) voice in the legislation and government. 
God himself will bring about this restoration, showing Himself 
to be the present Lord of the nation, as He was when He led 
their fathers, — the c tribes of Israel 5 and the Congregation of 
the Lord,' — by the pillar of cfoud and of fire ; and He will pro- 
tect and defend 6 the glory,'f — this glorious restoration of his 
Name which He has effected — as a tent shelters the traveller 
from the sun or the storm, or as the same pillar of cloud or fire 
defended the hosts of Israel from the pursuing enemy or the 
burning noonday heat : — 

And the Lord will create upon every dwelling-place of Mount 
Zion, 

And upon her assemblies, 

A cloud and smoke by day, 

And the shining of a flaming fire by night : 

For upon all the glory shall be a defence. 

And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the day-time 
from the heat, 

And for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from 
rain. 

* They seem to have preached regularly on Sabbaths and New-moons : — ■ 
2 Kings, iv. 23. 

■f ' For I, saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and 
will be the glory in the midst of her.' — Zechariah ii. 5. 



ISAIAH V. : HEBREW IDYLL, 



49 



CHAPTER IV. 

TSAIAH V- COMING WOES. FUSING POWER OF IMAGINATION. — HEBREW 

IDYLL. ANCIENT FERTILITY OF JUDAEA PRESENT BARRENNESS. THE 

VINEYARD OF THE LORD OF HOSTS. SELFISHNESS IN AN ARISTOCRACY. — - 

RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF LANDOWNERS. PROPERTY A TRUST. HEBREW 

AND ENGLISH LAWS OF ENTAIL. WORD AND WORK OF THE LORD. GOD 

A CONSTITUTIONAL RULER. — ABUSE OF WORDS BY WORLDLY MEN. THU- 

£YDIDES. FULFILMENT OF ISAIAH^ THREATS TO HIS COTEMPORARIES — 

AND TO ALL AGES SINCE, — GROTIUS ON PROPHECY, 

The contents of this discourse show it to belong to the same 
period as the two preceding ones ; but perhaps we may see 
some indications that it properly follows them, as being of rather 
a later date. The gloom of the approaching calamities is deeper, 
and in addition to the previous pictures of the effects of foreign 
invasion, we have now a description of the invaders themselves, 
and of their coming, hardly less explicit than when the prophet 
speaks of them by name to king Ahaz, in chapter vii. verse 18. 

The last prophecy began with an apologue of ' the Last Days ;' 
this opens with a like poetical picture of the former and the 
present times of Israel. Isaiah seems for a moment to think 
of Zion as in the days of her first love, when she still called the 
Lord 'her Beloved;' and in her name he begins to speak: — 
and then, in the rapid transitions which succeed, we have one of 
the instances, almost as frequent in Isaiah as in Shakspeare or 
Milton, of that true poet's imagination, which does not merely 
collect and arrange a succession of beautiful thoughts, but fuses 
them into one homogeneous whole, though they may be so 
diverse that less skilful hands could hardly bring them together. 
The Hebrew Pastoral or Idyll, as we see in the Canticles, 
chooses the imagery of the vineyard rather than that of the 
sheepfold. The Jewish poets embody their ideal of a happy 
life, in the sitting under their own vine and under their own h'g- 

E 



50 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



tree ; and this * Song of the Beloved touching his vineyard/ 
gives a lively picture of what a vineyard was.* 6 Apertos 
Bacchus amat colles ;' and this vineyard is on (literally in, i. e. 
on the side of), a hill, of which the Hebrew expresses the 
fertility by calling it { a horn the son of oil.' Oil may here be 
used metaphorically for fertility, or the vineyards of Palestine 
may have been planted with olive trees, which would at once 
support the vines and supply a fruit of their own ; and if there 
were any other trace in the Scriptures of the belief that the 
olive increased the fruitfulness of the vine when they grew to- 
gether, we might suppose an allusion to it here. Lowth and 
other commentators illustrate the word horn by instances of the 
same and like metaphors in other languages. We call a pro- 
montory a cape or head, and the Turks a nose ; a ridge in Latin 
is dorsum ; Brundusium, which, according to Strabo, signifies a 
stag's head in the ancient language of the country, is described 
by Lucan as stretching out a tongue and horns into the Adriatic. 
Solinus says that the south of Italy divides into two horns, and 
Cambden that 6 Cornwall is called by the inhabitants, in the 
British tongue, Kernaw, as lessening by degrees like a horn, 
running out into promontories like so many horns.' So Statius 
has Cornu Pajmassi, and the Swiss have such names as Buchhorn, 
Schreckhorn, for mountains. And so Demetrius told Philip, 
that 'the hill Ithome (with its citadel of Messene) and the Acro- 
corinthus, were the two horns of the Peloponnesus, which he 
who held was master of the bull.' | Lowth farther observes, with 
his wonted taste, that f Whoever has considered the descriptions 
given of Mount Tabor, and the views of it which are to be seen 
in books of travels ; its regular conic form rising singly in a 
plain to a great height from a base small in proportion; its 
beauty and fertility to the very top, will have a good idea of " a 
horn the son of oil." ' The land of Israel was once a fertile as 
well as a mountainous country : Moses calls it 6 the mountain of 
thine (God's) inheritance ' J and ' that goodly mountain ' ; § and 

* " Schulz states that he supped under a vine whose stem was about a 
foot and a half in diameter, its height about thirty feet, while its branches 
and branchlets, which had to be supported, formed a tent of upwards of 
thirty feet square." — Kitto's Bill. Cyclop., art. Vine. 

f Polyb. vii. 11. quoted in Grote's History of Greece, x. 309. 

% Exod. xv. 17. § Deut. iii. 25. 



FERTILITY OF JUDiEA. 



51 



afterwards describes it as c a good land, a land of brooks of water, 
of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills ; a 
land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pome- 
granates ; a land of oil olive, and honey ; a land wherein thou shalt 
eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it ; 
a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou may est 
dig brass : . . . a land which the Lord thy God careth for : the 
eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the be- 
ginning of the year even unto the end of the year.' * The eyes 
of the Lord have ceased to be upon it ; the curse has been as 
truly fulfilled as once the blessing ; and the traveller now finds 
the mountains returned to their natural barrenness, though 
still bearing traces of long - abandoned cultivation. The 
way in which the change has been effected, is thus lucidly 
explained : — e Judaea, the southern part of Palestine, is a 
country full of hills and valleys, conformably to the Scriptural 
intimations. The hills are generally separated from one another 
by valleys and torrents, and are for the most part of moderate 
height, uneven, and seldom of any regular figure. The rock of 
which they are composed is easily converted into soil ; which, 
being arrested by terraces when washed down by the rains, 
renders the hills cultivable in a series of long narrow gardens, 
formed by these terraces, from the base upwards. Thus, the 
hills were cultivated in former times most abundantly ; and were 
enriched and beautified with the olive, the fig-tree, and the 
vine ; and thus the limited cultivation which now subsists is still 
carried on. But when the inhabitants were rooted out and cul- 
tivation abandoned, the terraces fell to decay, and the soil which 
had collected on them was washed down into the valleys, leav- 
ing only the arid rock, naked and desolate. This is the general 
character : but in some parts the hills are beautifully wooded ; 
and in others, the application of the ancient mode of cultivation 
— under which the valleys are covered with corn, while the ter- 
raced hills are clothed with fig-trees, olive-trees, or vines — sug- 
gests to the traveller how rich this country once was and still 
might be, and how beautiful was the aspect which it offered. 
All these characteristics of desolation apply with peculiar force 



* Deut.viii. 7—9., xi, 12. 
e 2 



52 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



to that portion of Judaea which formed the inheritance of Ben- 
jamin. Its most favourably situated mountains are wholly un- 
cultivated ; and perhaps in no other country is such a mass of 
rock exhibited, without an atom of soil.' * 

I believe that, in a poetical allegory there is always more or 
less of allusion to the details of that which is allegorised ; but 
it is only allusion, — to be realised by the imagination, rather 
than by the understanding, of the reader, as well as of the poet. 
The several images are parts of a picture, which must be con- 
templated as a picture, and its meaning is to enter into the mind 
through the imagination. Still, a matter-of-fact commentator, 
like Vitringa, deeply imbued with the spirit of his author, will 
sometimes greatly help his reader's imagination, even by his un- 
imaginative remarks : and I think this is the case in his explana- 
tion of the details of this description of the vineyard. — A vine- 
yard consists of vines planted for the sake of their fruit : the 
Hebrew nation with its tribes, its families, and its persons, was 
such a vineyard, appointed to bring forth the fruits of personal 
and social religion and virtue, — holiness, righteousness, and love 
to God and man : this nation was established in a land flowing 
with milk and honey, endowed with all natural advantages, all 
circumstances which could favour inward life by outward pros- 
perity ; and the grace and favour of the Lord, and the influences 
of His Spirit, always symbolised by oil, were continually caus- 
ing it to be fruitful : e And he fenced it,' — the arm of the 
Lord of hosts, employing kings and heroes, was its defence 
against all enemies ; its institutions were fitted to preserve in- 
ternal order, and to prevent the admixture of evil from without, 
with the chosen and separated nation ; and its territory was 
marked out and protected by natural boundaries in a noticeable 
manner : 6 And gathered out the stones,' — the heathen nations, 
and the stocks and stones they worshipped : i And planted it 
with the choicest vine,' — a nation of the noble stock of the patri- 
archs, and chosen and cultivated by the Lord of the vineyard, 
with especial care, for his own use : ' And built a tower in it,' — 
namely, Jerusalem — - for the protection and superintendence of 
the vineyard, as well as to be its farm-house, so to speak : ( And 
also made a wine-press therein,' — where the wine-press seems to 

* Kitto's Physical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 32, 33. 



ISAIAH V. 1 — 7. : THE VINEYARD. 



53 



point to the same idea as the sending the servants to receive the 
fruit in our Lord's modification of this parable : lawgivers, kings, 
and judges, the temple with its priesthood and ordinances, and 
the schools of the prophets, were the appointed means for press- 
ing out and receiving the wine — the spiritual virtues and graces 
of the vineyard.* And the end is, that 

He looked that it should bring forth grapes, 
And it brought forth wild grapes. 

The master of the vineyard appeals to the inhabitant of Jeru- 
salem, as to an impartial stranger, to judge what more could 
have been done for the vineyard ; and to approve his decision as 
to what shall be done, when the stock of the choicest vinef has 
turned out to produce nothing but wild, or crab-grapes, after all 
the culture bestowed on it : it is worthy of nothing but to be 
laid waste, and this is what he will do to it. And then (by 
one of those transitions and fusions of the parts of the 
imagery into a perfect whole), after the utterance of what an 
earthly master of a vineyard might do, follows, * I will also 
command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it — which 
reminds us that it is the Lord of hosts who is speaking, and that 
His vineyard is the House of Israel. The men of Judah, who 
were the plants of His choice and delight, have brought Him the 
fruits of their mere sinful nature, instead of those of His election 
and grace; 'He looked for judgment, but behold oppression ; for 
righteousness, but behold aery : ' and the inhabitant of Jerusalem, 
who had been appealed to, as an impartial judge between the 
vineyard and its master, hears the still voice of his own reason 

* Grotius, following Jerome, explains the wine-press by the altar with its 
blood of sacrifices. 

j- " Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed : how then art 
thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me ? " Jere- 
miah ii. 21. Lysias, in the place quoted above (page 2.), attributes the * nohle 
and wonderful deeds ' of the Athenians to their noble stock as well as to 
their political wisdom : — Kal yap toi Kal <pvi/res KaXcos Kal yvevres oftoia, /c. t. A. 
He just before explains this noble birth to be their autochthony, which had 
enabled their political existence to be a just one from the very first, instead 
of being founded, in the ordinary way, on the violent expulsion of a previous 
race. The same idea is recognised by the Hebrews in their habitual claim 
to their land as the land of their father Abraham. How far this was, or 
was not, the ground of their right, I shall notice hereafter. 

e 3 



54 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



and conscience pronouncing to him, as it did to the pharisee 
who listened to the same parable 800 years afterwards, 6 Thou 
art the man.' 

Selfishness, or the making self the centre to which all things 
are to tend, is the great sin in all ages and peoples. As soon 
as national institutions have awakened the sense of personality 
and the feeling of self-respect, the evil desire of accumulating 
wealth for that self begins to arise. And in no form is it more 
hateful than in connection with the possession of land. Men 
desire, by an almost universal instinct, to possesss property 
in land, with its healthy occupations and interests, so varied 
and multiplied by the living powers of nature ; and this kind 
of property, while it offers more enjoyment than any other, 
brings a claim for more, and more obvious, duties than any 
other, by bringing a man into more complete personal relation- 
ships with his neighbours than is possible in the crowd of cities, 
and the whirl of city trades. And therefore the prophet pro- 
nounces his first, and, as it were, a special woe, on the selfish 
landowner. He who can join house to house, and lay field to 
field, when he knows, and long has known, face to face, the very 
man, wife, and child whom he has dispossessed, and can drive 
out by his own simple act his fellow-men to be desolate in their 
poverty, in order that he may be alone in his riches, may expect 
a punishment proportioned to his crime. Such men were the 
nobles of Judah and Israel throughout the land ; and the pro- 
phet heard, ringing in his ears, the declaration of the Lord 
and King of the land, that the great and fair palaces should 
become as desolate as the peasants' and yeomen's cottages which 
had made place for them : — the lordly vineyard of ten acres 
shall yield but eight gallons of wine, and the corn-field shall 
give back but a tenth part of the seed sown in it. 

We have all seen, in the present day, how this eternal law of 
politics has been executed in Ireland by the famine, with its 
inevitable accompaniments the Poor Law and the Encumbered 
Estates Act : and though the course of social changes is so noise- 
less in England that it attracts less attention; yet those who do 
look into the reasons why this or that estate passes from an old 
to a new owner, can usually see plainly enough that those reasons 
are moral ones — that when a man has to sell the home of his 



I SAT AH V. 8—10. : DUTIES OF LANDOWNERS. 55 



fathers, it is almost invariably because he and they had ceased 
to acknowledge that they held it on the tenure of social duties. 
All property whatever is, doubtless, a trust ; but the principle 
always has been, and always must be, more clearly illustrated in 
landed, than in any other property ; and this, not less by the 
efforts of selfish men to deny, than of good men to assert it. If 
we suppose the history of England to be the gazette of its battles, 
we may be content to explain our feudal institutions in the 
middle ages as arrangements for providing the kings with 
soldiers : but, looking a little deeper, we see that they were a 
complex organisation of patriarchal government ; in which, if 
the tenure of the landowner's occasional military service to the 
king was the more palpable, it was not more real, nor more im- 
portant as an element of national life and progress, than the 
daily and hourly performance of his, and his wife's, and chil- 
dren's, personal and social duties to their vassals. In as far as 
the feudal spirit was true to itself, it taught the English lord to 
hold that it was the mark, not of the Christian gentleman but 
of the usurer and the alien, to have a merely selfish right in 
property which he could call his own : and when, in a later age, 
the gentleman borrowed the usurer's money, and then pleaded 
his family's inalienable right to its land in bar of repayment, we 
were happily drawing towards a stage of our history in which 
the law was strong enough to assert its majesty against even the 
statute-makers of the time being, and to teach them that they 
had duties to usurers and aliens, as well as to a vassal yeomanry.* 
Then the judge upon the bench showed himself more than a 

* I refer, of course, to the subtle legal construction by which the judges, 
in Edward IV.'s reign, gave the first deadly blow to the famous statute 
De Donis, 13 Edw. 1. c 1. This was a law "by which the barons thought 
effectually to prevent any future alienation of their estates from their 
respective families. But after throwing out hints in the long interval, as to 
what could be done, the judges under Edward IV. decided that an ' estate- 
tail ' could be effectually converted into a ' fee-simple,' by the fiction of 
' common recovery.' The king may have sanctioned or connived at this 
decision, with a view to break the power of traitor-barons the easier ; but 
when we remember the growing spirit of independence in the educated 
class, and the increased importance of trade, there seems little doubt that 
the judges were conscious of the higher motive of compelling even nobles 
to pay their debts and leave off trampling on the middle classes. 

e 4 



56 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



match, in the cause of justice, for the baron in parliament : and 
now, when our ways of effecting our ends are become very dif- 
ferent, though the ends themselves — of truth or of selfishness — 
are still the same, the latest developments of the science of 
political economy are bringing out the same results in the form 
suited to this age. For they are proving, beyond refutation, 
that while an old and civilised State like ours, has the deepest 
interest — probably that of its very existence — in the mainte- 
nance of each individual's absolute legal property in his estate, 
it has an equally deep interest in his using his property in the 
way most beneficial to the community ; and a public and inde- 
feasible right, limited only by considerations of practical expe- 
diency, to enforce that user by any necessary means.* It may 
be thought strange to doubt the existence of a 6 natural right ' of 
property ; but I believe that, if we look quietly to the bottom 
of the matter, we shall see that the ordinary assertion of such a 
right is partly a misapplication of abstract reason to a subject 
which lies altogether within the region of positive institutions, 
historical experience, and the calculations of expediency ; and 
partly a selfish animal instinct, which reveals its true nature by 
its rage and fear at any alarm of losing its material possessions, 
and by the resolution which it then shows to defend these by all 
that physical force of police and soldiers, for the organisation of 
which alone society seems to it to exist. ( Right, in its most 
proper sense, is the creature of law and statute, and only in 
the technical language of the courts has it any substantial and 
independent sense. In morals, right is a word without meaning, 
except as the correlative of duty.' f 

It is hard to say how a nation, which is to preserve its own 
orderly existence, can remain without some laws or institutions 

* See especially the chapters on landed property in Mr. J. Stuart Mill's 
Principles of Political Economy. 

f Coleridge's Lay Sermons, p. 66. edit. 1852.— I have purposely adopted, as 
to the 'natural right' of property, Coleridge's argument, and almost his 
words, as to Jacobinism, which all agree is the assertion of man's ' natural 
right' to power. It is instructive to be reminded how ultra-conservatism 
and ultra-liberalism agree in appealing to ' natural rights ' instead of to the 
positive laws of an historical constitution, — to the petty individual reason, 
instead of to the universal reason, which, because it is universal, can only 
manifest itself in successive historical developments. 



LAWS OF ENTAIL. 



57 



for encouraging, or at least permitting, the disposition of its 
members to found families, to be maintained by hereditary posses- 
sions in land. Yet, if this disposition be not kept within bounds, 
those who are influenced by it will c join house to house, and field 
to field, till there be no place ; ' till the race of small landholders, 
yeomen, and partly independent tenants, is swallowed up by 
a few rich despots. To prevent this evil among the Jews, Moses 
directed as equal a division of the land as possible in the first 
instance, among the whole 600,000 families who originally formed 
the nation ; and provided against the permanent alienation of 
any estate, by giving a right of repurchase to the seller and his 
relations, and of repossession without purchase at the Jubilee.* 
The story of Naboth | illustrates the effect of these laws in 
forming an order of sturdy independent yeomen ; but it must 
also be taken as an instance of the habitual breach of the 
same laws by the rich and powerful J as they in like manner 
disobeyed that respecting the liberation of slaves at the Jubilee. § 
In England, where the Norman conquest had accumulated all 
the land in the hands of a few nobles, the like result of check- 
ing this accumulation has been effected by laws, in their form 
exactly opposite to those of Moses ; — by the permission to 
cut off old entails, and the prohibition to make new ones, ex- 
cept for one generation ; and by allowing land to be bought 
and sold like other commodities. The Hebrew constitution 
provided by law for the preservation of the old families, while 
our constitution at the same time that it gives them the means 
of sustaining themselves with even the most ordinary internal 
virtue and energy, permits them, if they become effete and 
worthless, to give way to new and more vigorous houses, which 
have raised themselves out of the ranks below ; and thus new 
blood is continually infused into the old organisation of the 
state. I do not indeed say, nor think, that our existing means 
are as effectual as they might be for the latter purpose ; but the 
law has very much less, and the private arrangements of fathers 
and sons very much more, to do with the alienation or retention 
of family estates than is supposed by most of the common argu- 

* Levit. xxv. 8 — 11., 23—28. f 1 Kings, xxi. 1—24. 

I Compare Micah, ii. 2. ; Nehem. v. 1- — 1 3. ; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 21. 
§ Jer. xxxiv. 8 — 16. 



58 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ments for or against c laws of primogeniture ' in England. Some 
remedies, too, are as bad as the disease ; and we must be cau- 
tious how we try to direct English free-will by Continental re- 
strictions. But how imperfectly we realise the ideal of the con- 
stitution; how deeply liable we are to the denunciations of 
the Hebrew prophet; and in what degree this national sin, 
with its practical bad consequences, might be checked by 
legislation, as well as preached against by the Church ; these 
points must be left for the reader's consideration. I would 
also direct his attention to the progress of the world as shown 
in the comparison of these opposite means, in ancient Israel 
and modern England, for effecting the same end, and for 
providing that element of the political constitution of each 
which the Jews marked by the name of s tribe,' and we usually 
call 6 feudal,' or e aristocratic,' but which is properly the ele- 
ment of family life as distinguished from the several other 
elements — industrious, intellectual, moral, religious, which 
have all their appropriate political forms of expression, and 
which together unite in one constitution or body-politic. Be- 
fore the times of the Christian Church, with its assertion 
of a spiritual constitution and order, which at once demanded 
the highest personal responsibility and permitted the fullest 
personal liberty, to its members, it was not possible for a State 
to allow its existence to depend so greatly on the free-will 
of its citizens as it now can ; nor to leave the provisions 
for such a main element of its organisation as (for instance) the 
breaking up of old families and the formation of new ones, with 
all the hazards consequent on both, to be regulated by the will, 
and according to the personal character, of the individual 
agents. 

Men grasp wealth that they may expend it in luxury ; and 
at last in the most sensual forms of luxury, — drinking and 
revelling. Such is the state of the rich men Isaiah sees around 
him. As in another age, the old Roman, who touched nothing, 
least of all ardent drinks, till the ninth hour of the day *, was 
succeeded by the race who could boast with Horace, — 

* " They always ate but once a day, and that was in the evening." — De- 
scription of the Golden Age in King Alfred's Boethius, S. Turners Hist, of 
England, ii. 36. 



ISAIAH V. 11, 12.: WORD AND WORK OF GOD. 



f>9 



' Est qui nec veteris pocula Massici, 
Nec partem solido demere de die 
Spernit 

so the land of Israel has fallen from the blest state in which its 
princes ( ate not in the morning, but in due season, for strength 
and not for drunkenness ; ' * and we see men 

' That put far away the evil day, 
And cause the seat of violence to come near ; 
That lie upon beds of ivory, 
And stretch themselves upon their couches, 
And eat the lambs out of the flock, 
And the calves out of the midst of the stall ; 
That chant to the sound of the viol, 

And invent to themselves instruments of music, like David ; 
That drink wine in bowls, 

And anoint themselves with the choicest ointments : 
But are not grieved with the affliction of Joseph.' f 

And thus embruted, they have lost all sense of there being any 
divine order and government of the world, for have they not 
even obliterated the natural distinctions of healthy appetite, 
and of night and day ? They cannot retain any glimmering of 
that which God had revealed to their nation, above all other 
nations, and was still telling them by the mouth of His pro- 
phets, — that the whole world, social no less than natural, the 
heavens as well as the earth, had been created according to the 
designs conceived in the eternal mind of God himself, of which 
mind the declaration and explanation is called his ( Word,' 
the actual realisation of the design his f Work,' and the 
various processes by which He is effecting that realisation the 
* Operation of his hands,' while the ultimate end of the whole 
is named the * Glory of God.' J 

They have no knowledge either of the Word or the Work of 
the Lord: they lack that which alone could save them, which 
alone has upheld any nation, in any age or clime, and which 
alone can uphold us riow here in England. Their feasting and 

* Eccles. x. 17. 

f Amos, vi. 3 — 6. where the prophet is speaking of the same Jewish 
nobles. 

| Compare Psalms, xxxiii. 4., xcii. 4, 5., cxi. 2 — 8., lxiv. 9, 10., xxviii. 
5., lxxvii. 12, 13, 14. 



60 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



drunkenness is about to be succeeded by thirst and famine ; by 
an indefinite, hopeless, desolation of the whole land, dark and 
deep as death and the grave ; so that hell, with its insatiable 
maw, shall be the only banqueter, and its food the hopes and 
life as well as the bodies of men. 

The nation has forgotten God, the Lord living and reigning 
among them; they are sunk into selfish, carnal ease, trusting 
in their riches and glory, and in the apparent stability of their 
civil and ecclesiastical institutions. Therefore the Lord sum- 
mons this carnal glory, and the men who trust in it, to judg- 
ment, to try what there is in it, whether it has anything by 
which it can stand without His help ; and then they will see by 
the judgment and its execution (which will be according to 
truth and righteousness), that all their glorious endowments 
were given them by God as witnesses of Himself, and means 
whereby to attain to the knowledge of Him, but that apart 
from Him they have no worth. This judgment came upon the 
men whom Isaiah addressed, in the reign of Ahaz, soon after 
the delivery of the warning ; but in order fully to understand 
it, we must (as in the case of all the other prophecies) look at 
it in the light of the Gospel. Then was the selfish and carnal 
nation brought to its final and most awful trial, righteously 
condemned, and its sentence carried into execution by that Man 
whom God had appointed. And then, while all flesh, not except- 
ing those institutions which God had himself ordained, but which 
men had turned into a lie, was utterly humbled, did God exalt 
Himself and His Son, and sanctify His holy Name, setting it up 
in the world, and causing it to triumph over all opposition. In 
the present day our consciences are so insensible, that we can 
hardly realise any practical belief in the reality of judgments 
from God upon our nation. One reason of this seems to be, 
that such vague recognition as remains to us of a Divine King 
invisibly reigning over the nation, is rather the acknowledgment 
of a despotic than a constitutional lord ; one who from time to 
time puts forth his power to prevent or punish flagrant crimes, 
but not one who is steadily governing us by fixed laws, and 
administering settled institutions. For though we may slavishly 
dread an arbitrary will, we can never feel for it that salutary 
fear which is the beginning of wisdom ; and unless we believe 



ISAIAH V. 16, 17.: GOD A CONSTITUTIONAL RULER, 61 



that God's judgments are righteous — that they are a part 
of the steady administration of a polity — as well as good in 
their effects, it will be impossible for us to keep long from 
superstition, or its opposite, scepticism. And, therefore, we 
should take heed to this repeated assertion, that God is ex- 
alted in executing justice, and sanctified in righteousness. The 
sanctifying God is the recognising and worshipping Him as holy 
and separate from all other gods, and the renouncing and 
denying all others as false gods. This shall be the end of the 
Lord's judgments : and the prophet contemplates the judgment 
and the reformation with a chastened contentment, while he 
pictures the once richly cultivated fields as become a pasture for 
lambs ; and the lands of the selfish nobles, after being desolated 
by the Assyrian invader, as now restored to a humble peace by 
the presence of the wandering shepherds, those friendly strangers, 
Rechabites or Kenites, who still appeared from time to time in 
the plains of Palestine with their flocks, as Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob had themselves done in old times, when they too were 
strangers (the same word) in the land of the Canaanites. 

There is no need to decide whether we are to give a literal or 
an allegorical meaning to this verse, for the one image into which 
the two are fused is the only adequate counterpart to the event : 
the lands wasted by the inroads and invasions which followed 
the delivery of this prophecy were no doubt pastured by flocks 
that were owned by others than the former landlords ; and the 
rule of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and their rich and selfish nobles, 
was succeeded by that of the lamblike Hezekiah. 6 He in the 
first year of his reign, in the first month, opened the doors of the 
house of the Lord, and repaired them. And he brought in the 
priests and the Levites, and gathered them together into the east 
street, and said unto them, Hear me, ye Levites, sanctify now 
yourselves, and sanctify the house of the Lord God of your 
fathers, and carry forth the filthiness out of the holy place. For 
our fathers have trespassed, and done that which was evil in the 
eyes of the Lord our God, and have forsaken him, and have 
turned away their faces from the habitation of the Lord, and 
turned their backs. Also they have shut up the doors of 
the porch, and put out the lamps, and have not burned in- 
cense nor offered burnt offerings in the holy place unto the God 



62 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



of Israel. Wherefore the wrath of the Lord was upon Judah and 
Jerusalem, and he hath delivered them to trouble, to astonish- 
ment, and to hissing, as ye see with your eyes. For, lo, our fathers 
have fallen by the sword, and our sons and daughters and our 
wives are in captivity for this. Now it is in mine heart to make 
a covenant with the Lord God of Israel, that his fierce wrath 
may turn away from us.' * Nor must we forget that other 
and greater fulfilment of the words when Paul, the apostle 
of Jesus Christ, said, ( The foolishness of God is wiser than 
men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For 
ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men 
after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are 
called : but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to 
confound the wise ; and God hath chosen the weak things of the 
world to confound the things which are mighty ; and base 
things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God 
chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things 
that are : that no flesh should glory in his presence. But of 
him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wis- 
dom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption : 
that, according as it is written, he that glorieth, let him glory 
in the Lord.'j 

The sensual reveller simply disregards God's constitution 
and government of society ; but the shrewd man of the world, 
and the intellectual sceptic, sneeringly deny its reality. ' Wise 
in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight,' do they 
not see clearly that selfishness is at bottom the one real 
motive-power of society ? priests or prophets may preach 
about good and evil, light and darkness, right and wrong, as 
though these words represented realities essentially contrary ; 
but do not they know that these are but words, useful instru- 
ments by which wise men govern fools, but to which they are 
themselves no slaves ? shall the astute and able men who have 
been transacting public affairs, or their own business, with such 
perfect success for so long past, who have carried on the whole 
social and political mechanism during the prosperous reigns of 
Uzziah and Jotham, be threatened with this 'counsel and 



* 2 Chron. xxix. 3—10. 



f 1 Corinthians, i. 25 — 31. 



ISAIAH "V. 18 — 23.: ABUSE OF WORDS, 



63 



work of the Lord?' Strong at once in their religious for- 
malism, and their pride of worldly craft, they reply, 6 Let Him 
make speed, and hasten His work, that we may see it ; and let 
the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that 
we may know it ! ' — In the act and habit of thus rejecting the 
guidance of the Lord, they have harnessed themselves to their 
sin as to a waggon, and they shall draw the load of their choice 
till they find whether it be the woe that the prophet declares 
it to be. 

Vitringa quotes the famous description by Thucydides, of the 
like confusion between virtues and vices, and their very names, 
the consequence of the Greek civil wars : Kal rrjv slcoOvlav a^lco- 
ctlv rcbv ovofjbdrcov sis tcl spy a avirjKka^av rf} BtKaidoasL' roXfia 
(jlsv yap akoyto-ros, avSpla (friksraipos svofxlaOr}' pLsWrjais Ss 
it po ixT)6 t)s, SeiXlo, svirpzirris' k. t. A-.* And he Hhen goes on to 
observe, that there are principles of truth in man's heart 
which are the foundations of all right, justice, and virtue — 
principles not only true in themselves, but e good ' and e sweet ' 
in their effects : that the revelation of J ehovah, His cove- 
nant with Abraham and his descendants, His laws and promises 
of temporal and eternal life to all who should obey them, were 
especially the 'light' of the Jews; and were 'good' and ' sweet,' 
because the source of all consolations in every struggle with evil, 
and the bond by which their political society was held together : 
that the wicked were not satisfied with practically renouncing 
this light, with its excellent fruits, but denied them by argu- 
ments, and perversion of the proper meaning of words : and that 
while this was a national sin in the days of Isaiah, the Jews 
filled up the measure of their iniquity in the time of Christ, 
when they rejected the Light of life as darkness, and evil, and 
bitter, making the light that was in them to be darkness. 

Lastly, among the men whom Isaiah denounces as the cor- 
rupters and destroyers of the society of which they are the 

* " The received value of names imposed for significationof things, was 
changed into arbitrary : for inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted 
manliness ; provident deliberation, a handsome fear ; modesty, the cloak of 
cowardice ; to be wise in everything, to be lazy in everything," &c. — 
Hohbess Translation, iii. &2. 



64 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



leaders, are the unjust lawyers and judges: he mentions as 
characteristic of them, that they are heroes at drinking, by which, 
perhaps, we are to understand, not that their heads and senses 
were overcome with wine like the drunkards spoken of above; 
but that the effect on their hearts and consciences was such as 
to harden them in their criminal perversion of the law. Perhaps 
the passage might be illustrated by instances of the professional 
character of hard-drinking but strong-headed judges of other 
times. 

The prophet then goes on, 

Therefore, as the fire devoureth the stubble, 

And the flame consumeth the chaff, 

So their root shall be as rottenness, 

And their blossom shall go up as dust : 

Because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, 

And despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. 

The c law ' of the Lord was given by Moses, and embodied 
in institutions and a code ; the c word ' was that exposition of 
the meaning and life of these which the prophets were from 
time to time declaring in the ears of the people. The nation 
had cast away this law, and despised this word. And when all 
heart and morality are thus gone from a nation, its roots below 
ground are rotten ; and its flourishing appearance is ready to 
turn to dust, like the apples which the traveller still gathers on 
the shore of the sea of Sodom. There is no substance in such 
a people, nothing which can stand calamity of any kind. 

Already, when the prophet speaks, the Lord has smitten 
them in his anger. Whether the earthquake which happened in 
the reign of Uzziah had actually filled the streets of Jerusalem 
with dead bodies, or whether Isaiah only makes it the image or 
instance of wider-spread national judgments, we cannot pro- 
nounce historically ; but in either case, the past and present is 
but a foretaste of heavier woes impending : the Lord has 
made the hills of their national prosperity to tremble, and per- 
sonal suffering has begun : but f for all this His anger is not 
turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.' He is about 
to bring foreign armies as the instruments of His judgment : 
the vision of the worst of human calamities — the invasion of a 
rich, civilised, luxurious nation by overwhelming hordes of 



ISAIAH V. 26 — 30. GROTIUS ON PROPHECY. 



65 



barbarians — rises before the prophet ; he speaks of them as pre- 
sent, and his words strike a kind of terror into the heart of him 
who reads them now, while he thinks of their fearful import 
then. The men and women who heard Isaiah speak these 
words in the court of the temple, in the highway of the Ful- 
ler's Field, or in some other crowded thoroughfare ; who lived 
to see . fathers and husbands, and sons and brothers, killed in 
the several invasions which soon followed, or mothers, wives, 
and daughters driven like herds of cattle to a sale and slavery 
worse than death ; and whose wealth and sources of wealth were 
utterly wasted by these and like inroads into their populous 
and highly cultivated little country ; could not have thought the 
prophet's language too strong for the events, though it seems so 
to many commentators of the last, or even the present century. 
Yet we must not forget that in an imaginative and unphilo- 
sophic age, more of the idea of prophecy has been preserved by 
several such commentators seeking its fulfilment in several 
distant events, than could have been the case if they had agreed 
to restrict it (as Grotius* and others have too dryly done) to the 
mere contemporaneous history. It is such, a picture of s the 
life of things,' that it is equally the description of the same 
judgment of God, in whatever age or to whatever nation 
occurring. In successive ages it told the Jew of the Assyrian, 
the Babylonian, the Greek, and the Roman ; to the subject of 
the Roman empire it spoke no less clearly of the Goth and the 
Vandal ; the British monk must have recalled it in the days 
when Gildas recorded the invasion of the Saxon ; the degene- 

* Nothing, indeed, can be sounder than the principle which Grotius lays 
down on this subject. He says, " In the prophecies, I have made it a main 
object to refer the particulars to the corresponding historical events : the 
reader will judge with what success. In this way certain passages which the 
old commentators refer to Christ and the times of the Gospel, I have re- 
ferred to events nearer the prophet's own times, yet as involving a type of 
those other Gospel times. I have done this because I saw it to be the only 
way of preserving that coherence of words and things which in the rest of 
the prophetical books is so admirable ; and, indeed, these passages do reveal 
to us Christians the counsel of God, who has shadowed forth to us the 
Messiah, and the benefits given us through Him, not by words only, but 
also by events." — Trotfat. ad Annotat. ad Vet. Testamentum. 

F 



66 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



rate Saxon learnt its truth from the Dane and the Norman ; 
and the Spaniard from the Mahometan; the Byzantine from 
Timour ' the incarnate wrath of God the Continental peoples 
from the revolutionary armies and Napoleon.' There is no land 
or nation where this terrible prophecy has not been fulfilled : may 
God give us Englishmen grace to take heed betimes, lest we 
need to be roused from our too thoughtless and selfish indiffer- 
ence, and find that these words, read, but scarcely listened to 
in our churches, have an awful practical meaning to us ! 

And He hath lifted up an ensign to the nations from far, 
And hath hissed unto them from the end of the earth : 
And, behold, they will come right speedily. 
None hath fainted nor stumbled among them ; 
None shall slumber nor sleep ; 
Neither is the girdle of their loins loosed, 
Nor the latchet of their shoes broken : 
Whose arrows are sharpened, 
And all their bows bent; 
Their horses' hoofs are counted like flint 
And their wheels like a whirlwind : 
Their roar is like that of a lioness, 
They shall roar like young lions : 
Yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, 
And shall carry it away safe, and none shall deliver it. 
And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of 
the sea : 

And if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, 
And the light is darkened in the heavens thereof. 

From the days of Isaiah this prophecy was fulfilled to the 
Jews again and again, till their cup was full, in the time of the 
Romans. Such are the judgments with which God visits a 
nation which forsakes Him, and obstinately refuses to return, 
6 Read,' says Yitringa, 6 Psalm, Ixix. 22 — 28. and cix. 5— 20. 
and tremble.' 



THE pkophet's commission. 



67 



CHAPTER V. 

ISAIAH VI. THE PROPHET'S COMMISSION. — THE TEMPLE ITS SCENES. THE 

VISION. INSIGHT INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS. PROPHECY RATIONAL AND 

INTELLIGIBLE. — GOD THE REAL AND ACTUAL KING. PLURAL OF MAJESTY. 

HOLINESS OF GOD HIS JUSTICE. — CALVINISM. 

The expression f In the year that King Uzziah died I saw,' 
implies that Isaiah wrote this account of his vision some time 
after it occurred ; and both this and the like phrase in chapter 
xiv. 28. suggest the thought that the prophet himself revised 
and arranged the book of his prophecies. Whether these ex- 
pressions refer to dates before or after the death of the kings 
mentioned in them, has been much disputed : in chapter xiv. 
the context will allow of either interpretation, nor in that of the 
passage before us can we assert that either is incongruous. 
Yet it seems reasonable to think with Gesenius, that if the 
meaning were after, the phrase would rather have been f In the 
first year of Jotham (or Hezekiah) ; ' and if we suppose with 
him and other commentators, among whom Jarchi rests on the 
authority of the Gemara, that the chapter before us is the 
record of Isaiah's original calling and consecration to the pro- 
phetic office, then it must be referred to Uzziah's lifetime, as the 
only prophecy which can correspond with the words of the 
inscription e which he saw in the days of Uzziah.'* There 
is certainly a great resemblance to the parallel accounts of 
the calling of Jeremiah and Ezekiel at the beginning of their 
prophecies f : and though this cannot be said to be conclu- 
sive against the supposition that Isaiah may have begun to 
to preach, before this vision gave the formal ratification of 
his appointment to the office for which the whole style of 
this as of his other writings shows him to have been long 
educating ; and though it would be no disparagement of the 
authority of that ratification to consider that it recognised 



* Ch. i. l. 



t Jer. i. ; Ezek. i. ii. 

f 2 



68 



HEBREW POLITICS, 



views of God's character, and of the state and prospects of the 
Jewish nation, which had already become familiar to the in- 
spired seer, while it confirmed and sanctioned them in a solemn 
and formal decree ; yet, perhaps, the actual manner and words 
of the commission which Isaiah now receives, rather indicate 
that it was the root and source of those prophecies which stand 
before it in the book, and in which there is an expansion, in 
various forms, of its fundamental ideas, than that it was a con- 
densed summary of truths already fully developed in his 
mind and in these discourses. * Once for all,' saysEwald, 'must 
he who was to be a prophet, have become absolutely certain of 
the true relation of the world and Jehovah, — must have beheld, 
as in a distinct form, the sublime and holy character of Jehovah, 
and felt that he was directed by Him alone : once for all must 
he have recognised the divine power of truth against the whole 
world, and himself as living and moving in it alone : once for all 
must he have entered, with the effectual energy and act of his 
whole inner being, into the counsels of God, and found himself 
for ever bound by them, and endowed by these bonds with true 
power and freedom : — this was the first condition, and the true 
beginning of all the work of the prophet, the holy consecration 
and the inner call, without which none became a true prophet ; 
and only he who had thus first turned his eyes within, and there 
found clearness and strength of sight, could afterwards look 
clearly and firmly into the world without, and there do his work 
as a prophet. Therefore, on the nature and strength of this be- 
ginning depended the whole subsequent life and work of a pro- 
phet : . . . . where the true and vigorous beginning of 
the work was wanting, all subsequent endeavours were weak 
and defective, empty, and unfruitful ; while in the true prophets 
that beginning never ceased to be operative, and the memory of 
it bloomed without fading in later years. If such a prophet 
undertook to record his more important prophecies in writing, he 
put at the head of them, and with a just consciousness of its sig- 
nificance, a description of that holy moment — often of a time 
long gone by — when he had first known Jehovah in His true 
majesty, and felt that he was called, sanctified, and endowed with 
strength by Him.' * 

* Ewald, Die Propheten, i. 20. 



ISAIAH VI. 1. : SOLOMON'S TEMPLE. 



69 



We shall then account, as has been already said, for the posi- 
tion of the earlier prophecies, by considering that they give a com- 
plete picture of the state of the nation at the time that Isaiah 
received his commission and entered on his office, and so supply 
us with the preliminary information necessary to the adequate 
comprehension of these. For the times of Jotham were but 
the continuation and counterpart of those of Uzziah, as to their 
selfishness, luxury, and worldliness, only that these were more 
and more rapidly preparing their own punishment by eating 
away the military and otherwise energetic spirit which had 
animated the people under Uzziah. 

The scene of this Vision is the Temple ; and its features will 
have been the same, whether we suppose them to have risen 
before Isaiah's imagination while he was absent from the spot, 
in the solitude of his chamber, or his house-top, or assume (as I 
myself prefer to do) that he was actually praying in the temple 
at the time. 

Though it is unlikely that any of the successors to what was 
but a small remnant of Solomon's kingdom, perfectly restored 
the temple after it was deprived of its original splendour by 
Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam, yet we see the worthier 
princes from time to time repairing the structure where it had 
been suffered to fall into decay, and replacing, as far as they 
could, the treasures and the costly decorations of which it was 
repeatedly despoiled to buy off foreign invaders ; and probably 
there was no period in which the restoration would be more 
complete than in the reign of Uzziah, who, in his power, wealth, 
and magnificence, came nearer than any other to Solomon. And 
there will be much more of fact than of fancy in the picture, 
if, for the clearer understanding of the scene of this vision, we 
figure to ourselves the youthful prophet in his rough hair or 
woollen garment (possibly not unlike that of the Capuchin 
friar as we now see him in the streets or churches of Rome) 
going up to the temple to worship ; — and if we look with him 
at the temple, as, at the end of 300 years from its building, 
it must have presented itself to his eyes, with its ample 
courts and colonnades, its porch with high spire-like front, and 
its Holy House, and Holy of Holies, well-proportioned, and of 
the most elaborate workmanship, though rather massive than 

F 3 



70 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



large, according to our notions. As he crossed the variegated 
pavement of the ( great court of the congregation,' and stopped — 
for we have no reason to suppose him a Levite — at the entrance 
to the inner or i priests' court,' on each hand would rise one of 
the tall pillars which Solomon set up, in token that the king- 
dom was constituted by the Lord, and would be upheld by His 
might*, and which, once of 6 bright brass,' but now mellowed into 
bronze, had their square capitals richly wreathed with molten lilies, 
chain-work, and pomegranates ; before him, resting on the back 
of the twelve oxen, and cast, like them, in brass, would appear the 
* molten sea,' a basin of thirty cubits in circumference, and 
containing two or three thousand baths of water, its brim 
wrought *like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies,' and 
under these a double row of ornamental knobs ; while on each 
side stood five smaller lavers, the bases of which rested on 
wheels, and were most elaborately ornamented with oxen, lions, 
cherubiins, and palm-trees, engraved upon them ; and beyond 
these again he would see the great brazen altar of burnt offer- 
ing, with its never-extinguished fire ; and overhead the roof 
of thick cedar beams resting on rows of columns. These were 
the courts of the palace of the divine King of Israel |, for the 
reception of his subjects and his ministers. The house itself 
again consisted of two parts, the outer of which, the holy 
place, was accessible to those priests who were in immediate 
attendance on their unseen Sovereign, while the inner, or holiest 
place, was the very presence-chamber of the Monarch who 
' dwelt between the cherubims,' which spread their golden 
wings over the ark containing the covenant He had vouchsafed 
to enter into with His people, and itself forming ' the mercy- 
seat,' where was ( the place of His throne and the place of the 
soles of His feet.' In the position which I have, following the 
requirements of the narrative in the chapter before us, supposed 

* Can there be much doubt that this was the meaning of Jachin and JBoaz 
(2 Chron. iii. 17.) ? As Solomon had the help of Tynan architects, it is in- 
teresting to compare the mention of the two pillars which Herodotus saw in 
the temple of Hercules, at Tyre. — Herodotus, ii. 44. 

■f Compare the description of Solomon's own house, which, besides its 
inner porch, had another, where he sat to judge the people, 1 Kings, vii. 7. 
The arrangement of the Temple is plainly that of a palace. 



THE UNSEEN KING OF ISRAEL. 71 

Isaiah to be placed, he would see through the open folding-doors 
of cypress, carved c with cherubims, and palm-trees, and open 
flowers,' and ( covered with gold upon the carved work,' into 
the holy place, which he could not enter; and the light of 
the golden lamps on either side would show him the cedar 
panelling of the walls, carved with knobs and open flowers, 
with cherubim s and palm-trees, festooned with chain-work, and 
richly gilt ; the mosaics of precious stones ; the cypress floor ; 
the altar of incense ; the table with the shewbread ; the cen- 
sers, tongs, and other furniture of f pure and perfect gold;' and 
before the doorway at the further end, and not concealed by the 
open leaves of the olive-wood doors (carved and gilded like the 
others), would be distinguishable the folds of the vail i of blue, 
and purple, and crimson, and fine linen,' embroidered with 
cherubims. In the East the closed vail, or purdah, declares the 
presence and secures the privacy of the monarch, into which 
no man may intrude and live ; and in the temple at Jerusalem 
it was the symbol of the awful presence and unapproachable 
majesty of the King, the Lord of hosts. The pious and 
thoughtful Jew, taught to connect the presence of his God with 
this actual dwelling-place in the midst of His own chosen nation, 
was thereby educated to realise the unity and the personality of 
God in a way that could not then have been otherwise possible. 
And thus he was not the less, but the better, enabled to feel 
and know that ( heaven and the heaven of heavens could not 
contain' the Lord, how much less then this house! That the 
fact was so, we see from the whole tenor of Solomon's prayer at 
the dedication of the temple, wdien, in the midst of the pomp and 
splendour of the assembled nation, the king, raised on a brazen 
scaffold near the altar, e kneeled down upon his knees before all 
the congregation of Israel, and spread forth his hands to 
heaven/ and in the name of his people renewed the national 
covenant with the Lord God of Israel, and received His ratifi- 
cation of it in the c cloud that filled the house of the Lord.' 
Other recognitions of that covenant occur to the mind as it 
transports itself into the past : we may picture to ourselves the 
triumphal return of the Jewish army from the field of 
Berachah, w T hen 6 they returned, every man of Judah and 
Jerusalem, and Jehosaphat in the forefront of them, to go again 

F 4 



72 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



to Jerusalem with joy ; ' i and they came to Jerusalem with 
psalteries, and harps, and trumpets, into the house of the 
Lord,' to celebrate with praise and thanksgiving their victory 
over the far stronger forces of a general gathering of the 
Moabites, Ammonites, and other shepherd nations, whose in- 
vasionshave been in all ages so terrible to a civilised country — 
a victory which even the neighbouring kings recognised as the 
work of the Lord, whose covenant with Israel both king and 
people had so earnestly pleaded before the battle : or we may 
see before us another time when the temple courts were again 
filled with armed men, not the splendid retinue of a peaceful 
monarch, nor the troops of one just returned from the war, but 
veteran soldiers, loyal nobles, and patriotic Levites, secretly 
assembled from distant parts of the country, and resolved at all 
hazards to restore the constitution subverted by the usurping 
murdress Athaliah, and to maintain the rights of the little child 
of seven years old who i stood in the midst of them at his pillar, 
as the manner was,' while ' they put upon him the crown and 
gave him the testimony, and made him king, and Jehoiada and 
his sons anointed him, and said, God save the king,' and then 
renewed for themselves, the people, and the king, the covenant 
which had thus once more been upheld in the person of the only 
remaining, only unmurdered, son of the line of David. And 
then, recalled by our text to e the year in which king Uzziah 
died,' we think of the scene which these same courts had wit- 
nessed shortly before, not of the ratification, but of the breach 
of the national covenant, when Uzziah, the man of his age, the 
very representative of the worldly spirit, the religious formalism, 
and the material energy and prosperity of the nation, had ('be- 
cause he was strong, and his heart was lifted up to his destruc- 
tion') intruded himself into the sanctuary to burn incense, and 
the bold remonstrance and resistance of the priests had been 
supported and enforced by his being suddenly { smitten of the 
Lord' with leprosy. For the meaning of Uzziah's act is 
plain : the co-ordinate offices of priest and king, and their 
exercise by separate persons, is a standing witness for the 
majesty of a present, though invisible, Lord, greater than both, 
and actually directing both, according to one divine law. 
Wherefore this spiritual independence is felt and understood to 



COLLISIONS OF CHURCH AND STATE. 



73 



be according to reason by every nation which realises its rela- 
tion to its divine Head ; but owing to the fallibility of all human 
agents, it produces so many apparent anomalies and real incon- 
veniences in practice, and often interferes so greatly with the 
smooth working of the state-machine, that it seems a thing 
which it would be well to get rid of, whenever that relation 
is forgotten in the absorbing care for the material prosperity of 
the people. Nor can we doubt what Isaiah himself thought of 
all these things, for the depths of his more than poet's and 
patriot's aspirations are still open for every one that will to 
read. 

Perhaps on this occasion, as certainly on many others, Isaiah 
had been joining in the public daily sacrifice and worship, and 
had afterwards brought his own free-willing offering — a bullock 
or a lamb without blemish. Such an offering, the symbol of his 
dedication of himself to God's service, would be the natural ex- 
pression of his earnest desire for some token that it was at last 
permitted him to enter on the actual functions of that prophetic 
office for which he had been so long preparing ; and that this 
vision was the answer to such heartfelt prayerful desire — 
itself an inspiration from on high — we may well believe. 

The notion that it is a poetic fiction by which Isaiah re- 
presents, as in an allegory, the commencement of his career as 
a prophet, is plainly a mere expedient of writers who cannot 
conceive, or believe in, any fact which transcends their indi- 
vidual experience. Thus the critics of the last century supposed 
the gods and goddesses in Homer to be an ingenious 'ma- 
chinery for the conduct of the piece,' exactly like that of the 
sylphs and gnomes in the ' Rape of the Lock,' and with no 
more reality to the poet's own mind ; and the rational philo- 
sophers and serious Christians fancied themselves required to 
quibble away the admonitions of Socrates to his disciples, to 
adhere to the actual worship of Apollo, or Eros, or Esculapius, 
before either the wisdom or the virtue of the sage could be safely 
or consistently approved: but in the present day, we are beginning 
again to understand the force of St. Paul's words when he told 
the Athenians that their poets and philosophers had, in their 
ignorant way, been trying to feel after and to find a divine 
Lord, of whose presence they were daily conscious, and whose 



74 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



offspring they believed themselves to be. Isaiah might pro- 
bably have said, as St. Paul did on a like occasion, 6 Whether I 
was in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell,' but he would 
undoubtedly have confirmed the plain meaning of his words, 
that the vision was a reality and a fact ; nor does he, in using 
those words, adopt a language essentially different from that 
which has been employed by wise and good men — neither 
fanatics nor impostors — in all countries and ages down to this 
we live in, to describe like inward experiences. Thus Words- 
worth, who, like every other great teacher, is at once the ex- 
pounder of truths for all times, and the thorough man of his 
own, after describing his other endowments as a poet, speaks of 

' Another gift, 
Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood 
In which the burden and the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on, 
Until the breath of this corporeal frame, 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things.' 

Let us thoughtfully bring before ourselves the youthful 
Hebrew seer, with his vigorous and cultivated imagination, his 
piety and faith towards God, and his longing to enter on the 
service of his country in that ministry to which he had de- 
dicated himself: let us consider the long mental discipline, the 
conflicts of soul, the hope and despair, the watching, the fasting, 
and the prayer, which alone could have formed such a man as 
the prophet Isaiah actually comes before us in each page of his 
writings : let us think of the ( burden and the mystery ' which 
must have oppressed his spirit when he looked on the wealth 
and prosperity around him, and thought how glorious his 
country might be, yet how plainly it was going forward to the 
ruin which his study of past history and of the warnings by 



INSIGHT INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS. 



75 



Moses, and his successors the prophets, told him was now ready 
to fall on this corrupt and sense -bound generation: let us enter 
into his heart's desire to save them, if it were yet possible, by 
recalling them to the knowledge of their invisible Lord and 
King, whose holy covenant and service they had forsaken ; and 
then into the sickness and despair which would replace that 
hope, when he thought of the men whom he had just seen 
assisting at the sacrifices with ( hands full of blood,' f the show 
of their countenances witnessing against them,' while the very 
stones of the pavement seemed ready to cry out, in God's name, 
f Tread my courts no more : ' let us remember how he felt and 
knew that he too was bound by the same evil nature and 
circumstances as these his countrymen ; how he must have been 
overwhelmed with the sense of what a work he was proposing 
to engage in, and how utterly bey ond his or any human strength 
it was; and how sustained, while overwhelmed, by the still 
deeper sense that there was a Power sufficient even for these 
things: — and then we shall find in the above-quoted calm and 
rational description of the experience of an Englishman of the 
nineteenth century, an explanation and illustration of the greater 
part at least of what not only may, but must, have been the 
mental and bodily state of the Hebrew prophet, when he f saw 
the Lord sitting on a throne.' The partly psychical, partly 
physical phenomena involved in this class of questions, may 
have to wait another generation before their turn arrives for 
that scientific investigation and solution which in every depart- 
ment of fact and thought is superseding the inaccurate theo- 
retical scepticism of the last century : we need an exact analysis 
of that intensified and exalted condition of the human mind 
which has given us language in one age, mythology in another, 
prophecy in another, and which still yields philosophy and 
poetry at least to us moderns ; and of that life of the body 
which must be the seat of hearing, sight, and our other senses ; 
which seems to assert an independent existence for itself and for 
the soul in dreams*; and which may be able in other modes to 

* " Seasoning operations may be conducted in sleep. Mathematicians have, 
in their slumbers, solved problems which posed them when awake. The 
great mathematician, Condillac, was sometimes enabled in his sleep to bring 
to a satisfactory conclusion speculations which, in the day, were incomplete. 



76 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



act without the help of those material organs which remain to 
the corpse on the dissecting-table, but give it no sensations. 
Yet if we must be content with the faith that our children will 
have a light not given to us in these things, we shall, I think, 
find that here, as in so much else, we may — if we will only 
clearly state to our own minds the question which we know we 
cannot completely answer — get a kind and degree of knowledge 
well worth having. For we shall perceive that we are under 
no necessity to resort to rabbinical or quasi-rabbinical figments 
in support of the reality of Isaiah's vision, nor to neological 
devices for getting rid of it : we shall be at least in a position 
to see that there is nothing monstrous in the fact, nor irrational 
in the belief, of a vision such as the prophet here describes ; 
and that we have not here one of those prodigies which super- 
stition delights in, and true no less than false philosophy recoils 
from, but an event solemn and wonderful indeed, yet having a 
more matter of fact reality, and a higher interest, to him who 
seeks to have a reason for his faith than to any other man. 

But while we thus recognise the prophet's mental state to 
have been a calm, rational, orderly, human state, we must 
remember that our Christian faith — nay, our reason, when 
illumined by faith — forbids us to conceive of this vision as a 
mere projection of that mental state, and of the seer as be- 
holding only what his own imagination had first created. Every- 
thing shows how thoroughly Isaiah was prepared to become the 
recipient of a communication from on high, but we are not 
therefore to be content to think that after all there was no 
actual communication, but only the supposition of it, which 
would do as well. Get a real personal knowledge of the mes- 
senger (and you must get this, not from commentators and 

Cabanis tells us that Franklin so often formed correct and highly important 
conceptions of persons and political events in his sleep, as to have been 
inclined to view his dreams with superstitious reverence, while the real fact 
was, says Cabanis, that the philosophers acute and sagacious intellect was 
operating even in his sleep. . . . Cases are on record of judges who, in their 
sleep, have delivered decisions of the weightiest kind ; and of poets who, in 
that state, have composed verses of great power and beauty, though they 
were by no means exempt from a certain degree of mystical indistinctness." 
— Sleep and Dreams, by J. A. Symonds, M.D. pp. 54. 62 , where the reader 
will find much more, illustrative of the point we are considering. 



OBJECTIVE REALITY OF REVELATION. 



77 



critics, but from hearty study of his own words), and then you 
will be better able to understand the message — the revelation — 
which God has employed that man to take to his brethren : for 
though God can and does speak through instruments uncon- 
scious of his designs, — a Csesar or a Napoleon, a whirlwind or 
an earthquake, — yet when He would lead us into the know- 
ledge of Himself, and of His wisdom and love towards us, He 
speaks only through men whom He has first qualified them- 
selves to understand and appreciate the good tidings they bear. 
But our reason will indeed have become folly, if we deduce 
from the complete qualifications of the messenger, that he lias 
no message; from the perfect adaptation of the means to the 
end, that there is no end. If we will be rational, no less than 
if we will be Christian, we must steadily recognise the reality 
— the objective, independent reality — of that communication 
which Isaiah was thus qualified to become the recipient of. 
How this could be, how God reveals his mind and will to men, 
how the poetic or other human faculty gives form and expres- 
sion to truths not imagined nor discovered, but communicated 
from on high, — this can never be explained : an explanation is 
a contradiction in terms, an assertion that the Infinite is de- 
finable, that the Superhuman is subject to the laws, and ex- 
pressible in terms, of the human. Let the understanding attempt 
to comprehend the Divine, and that which it has in its grasp 
inevitably proves not to be the thing inquired for. We must, 
and well may, be content to know that God has revealed 
Himself to man, and thankful that man is capable of receiving 
and benefiting by, though not of defining, that revelation. 

The throng of formal worshippers would have left the temple ; 
the voices of the choirs of singers ( clothed in white linen,' and 
chanting in alternate parts 

* O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, 
For His mercy endureth for ever,' 

or some other appointed psalm, would have died into silence ; 
and if other devout Israelites were praying apart, if the white- 
robed priest was silently presenting their prayers in the fragrant 
cloud of incense which rose from the golden altar in the holy 
place, the stillness and solemnity of the scene would be thereby 



78 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



heightened rather than disturbed. Then the vail of the temple 
was withdrawn, and the holy of holies discovered to the pro- 
phet's eyes ; and he saw the Lord sitting as a king upon his 
throne, actually governing and judging. His train, the symbol 
of dignity and glory, filled the holy place ; while around Him 
hovered the attendant seraphim, spirits of purity, zeal, and love, 
chanting in alternate choirs the holiness of their Lord: the 
threshold vibrated with the sound, and the 6 white cloud ' of 
the divine presence, as if descending to mingle itself with the 
ascending incense of prayer, filled the house. The eternal 
archetypes of the Hebrew's symbolic worship were revealed to 
Isaiah ; and as the centre of them all his eyes saw the King, the 
Lord of Hosts, of whom the actual rulers from David to Uzziah 
had been but the temporary and subordinate viceroys. In that 
presence, even the spirits of fire, which consumes all impurities 
while none can mix with it, cover their faces and their feet, 
conscious that they are not pure in God's sight, but justly 
chargeable with imperfection : and much more does Isaiah 
shrink from the aspiring thoughts he had hitherto entertained 
of his fitness to be the preacher of that God to his countrymen, 
— he a man of unclean lips, sharing the uncleanness of the 
people among whom he dwells. In utter self-abasement he 
realises the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the utter separation 
it makes between man and the holy God. 

Whether we take this chapter to be the first in actual date or 
no, it is the key to the whole Book ; and the announcement 
which it makes of the Holiness of the Lord is the key to the 
chapter. This vision in the temple was to Isaiah what that of 
the burning bush was to Moses. That God has made a cove- 
nant with the nation, a true 6 original social contract' between 
king and people, and of the people among themselves ; that each 
member of the nation is personally responsible for the breach 
of that covenant ; that the holiness and righteousness of God 
make it absolutely certain that He will enforce it, at whatever 
cost to the guilty parties; yet that the same righteousness 
causes Him to hold the contract binding on Himself as well as 
them ; and that therefore He has provided a way of reconcilia- 
tion between them and Himself through the sacrifice of that 
which separates them ; — this was what was revealed to Moses, and 



ISAIAH VI. 1 — 7. : HOLINESS OF GOD. 



79 



became the ground-work of the whole Hebrew polity. And now 
that a long course of worldly growth and progress had almost ob- 
literated this, the old fundamental faith of the nation, the same 
revelation is renewed to Isaiah when he is to be sent forth as 
the restorer of what Moses originally established. Every nation 
arrives from time to time at some crisis, when it must either lose 
all that it has hitherto gained, and so depart from its place among 
the nations, or else must shake off the evil, and with renewed 
strength go forward in its appointed course. And such a crisis 
had the Jewish nation come to in the time of Isaiah. He was 
to be God's main though not only instrument for carrying her 
through the struggle ; he is, therefore, first made to know his 
own utter insufficiency, and then to realise the sufficiency which 
comes from God alone. He was a circumcised Jew, a member 
of the holy, separated, covenanted nation, accustomed to seek 
purification from the stains of conduct in the rites of the law, 
and able to understand how those rites were morally efficacious 
when God accepted the sacrifice of the selfish will by the man 
of contrite heart. But now the exceeding sinfulness of sin it- 
self, of his nature not of his acts, was discovered to him ; and 
he needed the fire from the altar to be applied to his own lips, 
and not to the bullock or the goat he might have brought 
for sacrifice, and by God's own ministry, and not by the 
earthly priest : and this was done as a sacramental and effi- 
cacious pledge that he had now received that inmost purification 
which is the baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire.* ( Fire,' 
says Yitringa, 6 is something pure, burning, purifying ; it lays 
hold of, penetrates, and, as it were, converts into its own sub- 
stance whatever is susceptible of its action, thus hallowing the 
gifts laid on the altar. All these are the attributes of the Holy 
Ghost, whose office it is to purge and illuminate man, to excite 
him to the love of God, to affect him with zeal for His glory, to 
arouse him from sloth to fervour, to inflame him with courage 
and constancy, with energy and devotion of all his powers to the 
cause of God, and to enable him to make supplications to God 
according to His will. And in this place fire signifies the spirit 
of prophecy, which spirit, like fire, sanctifies men in a peculiar 



* Compare St. Paul's conversion, Acts, ix. 



80 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



manner to this great work, kindles, inflames, makes them glow 
with zeal ; and, what is true in itself and specially applicable 
here, converts them into seraphs.' God desired a willing mes- 
senger; therefore He does not command Isaiah to take on 
him the office, but gives him opportunity to do so if he be 
willing. And the prophet, now filled with the Holy Ghost, and 
feeling that in that power he is made holy, immediately pro- 
poses himself as ready to accept the commission. 

It has been, and is still discussed, whether, in the words 
6 Who will go for us ? ' as in the like use of the plural pronoun 
in other places in the Old Testament, there is a reference to the 
Trinity ; or whether the phrase is ( merely the plural of majesty,' 
or some other idiom. There is something opposed to all our 
present habits of thought and criticism in the notion that a word 
of this kind can be made to prove a dogma; yet to the mind 
which recognises a deeper meaning in words than the merely 
grammatical, the latter explanation will seem a very poor sub- 
stitute for the old dogmatic interpretation. It would be better 
to ask what is the origin of the ' plural of majesty.' Majesty, 
or greaterness, is the attribute of the personal head of a body, not 
that of a solitary individual, /is the word of mere will, good 
or evil ; we, that of counsel, fellowship, and co-operation ; and 
the plural of the latter expresses a higher unity than the singu- 
lar of the former. There is a higher unity in the marriage of 
man and wife than in the single half-existence of either sepa- 
rately, and in the Godhead which is the object of the Christian's 
faith than in the solitary Being whom the Mahometan or the 
Unitarian worships, f The first cause,' says Aristotle, ( is the 
last in discovery.' When it is at last revealed, we can look 
back and trace its workings in forms where it could not have 
been recognised at the time. And thus we, by the fulness of 
the light of the Gospel, can see in the language which combines 
the plural Elohim with the singular Jehovah, the preludings of 
that revelation of the Trinity in Unity, which the spirit of man 
was not yet educated to receive in its spiritual meaning, and the 
formal announcement of which could, therefore, have only con- 
firmed and perpetuated his natural proneness to polytheism. 

The prophet is 6 sent,' has a commission. This seems to be 
primarily and properly implied in the Hebrew words which we 



ISAIAH, VI. 8—10.: CALVINISM. 



81 



translate f prophet ' and f prophesy.' The Jew understood him 
to be f one who spoke not his own words, but those of another,' 
as Philo says ; one who was sent from God as His ambassador 
and interpreter : — as is evident from the (on this point) classical 
passage, Exodus, vii. L, where God says to Moses, I make thee 
a god to Pharaoh : and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet. 
The verb, too, is always used in the passive voice, in the Hebrew, 
to imply the same idea.* 

' To hear and not understand, to see and not perceive,' is 
used by Demosthenes as a proverb. It is here the expression 
of the sternest irony ; first as addressed to the people themselves, 
and then to the prophet, in reference to the effect of his 
preaching. As though the Lord had said, c You are warned ; 
disobey the warning, and take the consequences. 1 It is the 
will in men which believes and obeys, or hardens itself and 
rebels. Believing and obeying, God blesses it with ever- 
increasing light and power ; but if it refuses this light and 
power to walk in God's way, God does not permit it to retain 
these for its merely worldly and selfish purposes. f We not only 
may, but must, reject all those notions of God's character (some- 
times called Calvinistic, and with which it cannot be denied 
that Calvin did at times discolour his noble Christian faith) which 
make Him out to be a Being of mere arbitrary power, or with His 
attributes of wisdom, righteousness, and love, all limited by a 
lower than human caprice. But while we refuse to hear such 
a doctrine of devils, though an angel from heaven should preach 
it to us, let us also beware not to fall into the error, equally 
false, and equally pernicious, of bringing God's justice and 

* Gesenius, Lexicon, words and under the former of which 

he mentions the like usage of the Latin deponent verbs, to express the same 
class of notions : as, loqui, fari, vaticinari, &e. See, too, Ewald, Die 
Propheten, i, 6., to the like effect. 

f ",But when we in our viciousness grow hard, 

O misery on't ! the wise gods seel our eyes ; 
In our own filth drop our clear judgments ; make us 
Adore our errors ; laugh at us while we strut 
To our confusion." 

Antony and Cleopatra, iii. 11. 

Quoted by Mr. Trench, Notes on the Parables, p. 12., where the reader 
will find some instructive observations on this subject. 

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82 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



goodness down to the debased standard of worldly and sensual 
men, and of allowing ourselves to assume that it would be 
either just or merciful in God to permit men to go on inde- 
finitely in sin. There is nothing but the irreconcilable con- 
trariety between good and evil, holiness and sin, and the 
triumph of the former at any cost, to prevent our eventually 
arriving at that reign of power without justice, will without 
love, intellect without heart, which we may condemn in the form 
of ' Calvinism/ but to which we are continually tending, when 
we suspect it not, and are only brought back by God's judg- 
ment upon sinners ; — that reign in which the only God would 
be the devil.* 

And if it were anywhere necessary thus to assert God's 
righteousness against sin, most especially was it so in this the 
chosen nation of Israel. Israel had been set apart, that in him 
all the nations of the earth should be blessed ; and if he became 
reprobate, where were this promise to the world ? — 6 If gold 
rusteth, what should iron do?' Therefore the cities were to 
be wasted without inhabitant, and the land utterly desolate; 
and even after a partial recovery from this punishment, and a 
humble restoration of a small part of their ancient glory, the 
stern process should be repeated again and again : the invasion 
of Pekah and Rezin would be repaired only to be followed by 
that of Sennacherib ; the captivity of Manasseh would succeed 
the peaceful reign of Hezekiah ; Josiah would restore the king- 
dom only to be laid waste by the Egyptian and the Assyrian ; 
the Roman would come after the Greek, and even Hadrian 
after Titus. All thought of an earthly glory of the nation 
must give way before such a prospect. If the prophet looked 
forward with a patriot's hopes alone, there was nothing but 
humiliation and despair before him ; he could at most expect 
but such temporary alleviation and restoration as might enable 
him to do his work while he was there. No doubt — we shall 
come upon the proofs immediately — the prophet did not in the 
earlier years of his ministry take this view of the meaning of 
the promise with which the divine commission concludes ; but 
still trusted that the holy seed, the substance of the nation, 

* I need hardly remind the reader of Southey's picture of what such a 
reign would be ; — the Curse of Kehama. 



ISAIAH VI. 11 — 13.: DESTRUCTION AND RESTORATION. 83 

would spring up again, even in his own day, and Israel be re- 
stored to more than its pristine prosperity and power among 
the nations, as well as to its first and pure faith in its Lord. 
And when the terrible truth did at last become clear to him, he 
had been prepared to understand, and to declare to his own 
people, and to mankind, what more than adequate compensation 
was still behind. 

I have followed what seems the more probable meaning 
of verse 13., yet venture to observe that our Version makes 
a satisfactory sense, if we understand an allusion (by one of 
those poetical transitions which characterise Isaiah's strong 
imagination) to the tithes, the sacred portion of the produce 
of the land, and to their being duly gathered in and eaten by 
those to whom they pertained, and not to any wasteful con- 
sumption of them. Whether the concluding image of the teil 
(or terebinth) and the oak trees, is that of their casting their 
leaves, or of their being cut down, like the tree in Nebuchad- 
nezzar's dream, is uncertain. In either case the idea of the life 
subsisting under the apparent death is the same. 



G 2 



84 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ISAIAH, VII. — THE ACCESSION OF AHAZ. POLITICAL STATE OF KING AND 

PEOPLE. ' THE LORD SAID.' TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM. THE VIR- 
GIN CONCEIVING. THE INCARNATION AN UNIVERSAL IDEA HOW 

REALISED. LOSS OF HEBREW INDEPENDENCE. — ISAIAH NOT A MAGICIAN. 

The next, and following prophecies, to the end of chapter xvi., 
belong, with more or less clearness, to the reign of Ahaz. The 
s And' with which the narrative opens here, and in chapter viii., 
seems among the indications that the book has been arranged as 
a continuous whole; perhaps we might say the same of the 
beginning of chapter ii. 

The reign of Jotham was characterised (as I have already- 
observed) by the same material prosperity and order, internal 
and external, political and religious, as that of his father Uzziah : 
the difference (not easily perceptible at the time) will have 
been that a new generation was grown up, enervated by peace 
and luxury, and trusting as a matter of course to old traditional 
routine, when they were on the eve of events to which it would 
be as inapplicable as that of the Austrian s and Prussians, in the 
generation after that of Frederic the Great, was to meet the 
young enthusiasm of the French under Napoleon. 

The three narratives of these events — that before us, and 
those in the books of Kings and Chronicles —present those 
discrepancies which, however troublesome to reconcile, are just 
such as men accustomed to jostle with facts in police-courts or 
jury-boxes consider among the proofs that they are hearing a 
true story, and not a forgery ; but which some book-students 
(whose critical canons are quite other than those of the 
Niebuhrs, Grotes, or Arnolds) take for indications of ignorance 
or fraud, and throw aside accordingly. But there is little real 
difficulty, if we follow those commentators who combine the 
various accounts thus : — 

In the last years of J otham's reign, Pekah king of Israel, and 



EVENTS ON THE ACCESSION OF AHAZ. 



85 



Rezin, king of Syria, made an alliance against Judah ; and the 
accession of the weak youth Ahaz gave them a favourable op- 
portunity for their purpose. A great battle annihilated the old 
army of Uzziah (as that of Jena did the army of Frederic) ; 
the invaders plundered and wasted the whole country, and car- 
ried off a great multitude of men, women, and children, of 
whom the share of the Syrians was sold into slavery at Da- 
mascus, while that of the Ephraimites was sent back by the 
intervention of the prophet Obed, who recognised, and induced 
his countrymen to recognise, a bond and claim of brotherhood 
in the common blood and faith which their national enmities 
had lost sight of. Up to the falling of this unexpected blow, 
Ahaz, and his princes and people, no doubt retained the insolent 
self-confidence denounced by Isaiah in the previous chapters: 
but now their scoffing demand, that e the Lord would hasten 
His work that they might see it,' had been granted ; and when 
they heard that the allies were preparing for a second invasion, 
of which the object was, not merely the reaping another year's 
harvest of plunder, but also the taking of J erusalem, the depo- 
sition of the house of David, and the permanent subjection of the 
kingdom under a viceroy or tributary king, like those whom 
Sennacherib, in his lately deciphered annals, says he set up in 
Chaldaea, Phoenicia, and Philistia, after conquering those coun- 
tries* ; — then the people and their rulers were panic-struck ; c and 
their hearts were moved, as the trees of the wood are moved by 
the wind.' We may then understand by e Syria resteth upon 
Ephraim,' either 'has renewed the old alliance,' which, con- 
sidering the disorganised and half-barbarised state of these 
petty governments, was likely enough to have been only made 
for single campaigns ; or else e has encamped on the territory 
of Ephraim,' as if preparing for a fresh march into Judaga. 
The scornful phrase, c the two smoking tails of firebrands,' 

* One of these, Tubaal, is conjectured by Colonel Rawlinson (Outline of 
the History of Assyria, p. 22.) to have been the son of the man here men- 
tioned. This may seem fanciful ; but if the name stands good, we have a 
somewhat parallel case in the way in which Merodach Baladan appears, in 
the same annals, to have been king and fugitive alternately. There were no 
doubt particular chieftains and clans more powerful and aspiring than others^ 
in the series of barbarous irruptions which now broke from the North, 



86 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



seems to imply that they had already been wasting the country, 
and that the prophet foresaw that their power was just extinct : 
and if the main calamities of Pekah and Rezin's invasion had 
occurred after this prophecy was delivered, the discrepancy 
between its promises and their fulfilment would have been so 
great, that it is difficult to understand how it should have been 
preserved as authentic, for Isaiah himself would have doubted 
its entirely genuine inspiration. The improbability of Ahaz 
having any fears till after the destruction of his army has been 
already mentioned. 

Let the reader form a distinct image, from the narratives, of 
the position of Jerusalem and its people at this juncture, and 
he will see its exact correspondence with that described in 
chapter i. 

There is a singular pathos, as well as force, in the phrase 
6 the house of David,' in this place. David had succeeded in 
uniting the ancient factions of Israel and Judah into one 
strong monarchy * : when it was told him that the kings of 
the earth were gathering themselves together against him, 
he felt no fear, but went forth at the head of his armies, 
and in the name of the Lord destroyed them ; and among 
other nations whom he thus reduced, were the Syrians of 
Damascus, whose capital he garrisoned, and made themselves 
tributary. And now, the house of David had not only long 
lost the tribes of Israel, but was trembling for its own existence, 
threatened by those tribes, who had already almost annihilated 
Judah ' in a rage that reached up to heaven,' and were now 
returning in confederacy w T ith this very Syria to a new attack. 
And the faith no less than the might of David had departed 
from him who sat in David's throne : Ahaz had no trust in the 
Lord of the nation, and therefore his heart was moved, and he 
called on Assyria and Assyria's gods to help him. 

6 Then said the Lord unto Isaiah ' — not by some mira- 
culous communication, alien from all human experience, and 
of which neither the reality nor the worth is proved by say- 
ing that Isaiah's writings are a part of the Bible ; but by 
that inward and spiritual command which is daily and hourly 
telling each of us what is our work, and how we are to do 

* 2 Sam. v. 1 — 5. 



ISAIAH VII. 1 — 3.: TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM. 87 

it. Luther, in his Commentary on Genesis, in the midst 
of statements which show that he had no doubts of the oc- 
currence of miracles either in his own or any other age, 
makes singular efforts to give a non-miraculous character to 
the expression ( the Lord said ; ' explaining that it was Adam 
who spoke to , Eve, Shem to Abraham, and so on. The 
great preacher of the Word felt and knew that the mightiest, 
divinest, presence and power of the Holy Spirit, manifested 
itself through properly human discourse, and not by some voice 
in the air. When it is taught and received for orthodox that 
God only revealed Himself to men in former times by certain 
occasional and external miracles, and that our knowledge of 
Him is limited to what has been written down of such communi- 
cations, we have reason to fear that we have too little sense that 
God is always actively present with us now, and to suspect that 
our belief is mechanical, and sceptical and superstitious at once. A 
Luther, or even a Cromwell, would have shrunk from dishonour- 
ing the Spirit of God within him, by supposing that it was not 
by the same wisdom and the same power as inspired Isaiah, that 
he spoke and acted in the Diet of Worms, or on the field of 
Dunbar. 

Ancient topography is so often obscure, even when learned 
men get to the spot with their books in their hands, that perhaps 
it ought not to seem strange that it is yet disputed whether the 
6 highway of the Fuller's Field ' was on the west or the north of 
the city. For the former, Dr. Robinson quotes an authority of 
the middle ages, who speaks of a e gate of the Fuller's Field ' in 
the west wall ; while he thinks, also, that no where else can the 
6 upper pool of Gihon ' be well placed : for the latter, Mr. Wil- 
liams (also an investigator of the actual localities), observes that 
Josephus says, the 6 Fuller's monument ' was on the north side 
of the city, where also was the traditional site of the ' camp of 
the Assyrians,' which seems to point to Rab-shakeh's army; and 
he gives his own explanation of the water. I am not com- 
petent to judge between these learned writers, and those who 
have sided with each. But for reasons which I shall give when 
we come to Hezekiah's preparations for the expected siege 
of Sennacherib, the latter supposition enables me to form and 
to present to the reader a more coherent notion of what must 

G 4 



88 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



have taken place on the various occasions in which we require a 
picture — if only a fancy one — of the Jerusalem of that day ; 
and I, therefore, assume the highway of the 6 Fuller's Field ' to 
have been outside the northern gate which opened into the road 
to Samaria, and by which (as we see from chapter x. 28 — 32.), 
an army marching on Jerusalem might be expected. 

Isaiah, like the other prophets, taught not only by verbal 
discourse, but also by symbolical acts, which, especially in those 
times, gave a life and force to the former which it would not 
have had by itself. Accordingly he now takes with him his son 
Shear-jashub ( c a remnant shall return '), who was not impro- 
bably born during the grief and terror of the late invasion (in 
which Isaiah may himself have lost other children or relations), 
and was thus named as a sign to the people.* He finds Ahaz, 
no doubt accompanied, in oriental fashion, by a throng of people, 
just outside the wall of the city, examining the state of the 
fortifications, and of the reservoirs which, fed by the brook Gihon, 
were situated in that quarter, and which it was now necessary to 
provide for the defence of, that they might neither be available 
to the expected besiegers, nor cut off by them from supplying 
the city. The fullers had their works there, for the convenience 
of the water, and the causeway which led to their fulling ground 
was a convenient place for the purposes of both Ahaz and 
Isaiah, just as it suited Rab- shaken f when it was his object 
both to reconnoitre the ground for a siege, and also to harangue 
the people on the walls. 

Hitherto we have known the prophet as a writer, and through 
his writings ; now he comes before us as a speaker. The pre- 
sent and following chapters are much more like a report of 
actual speeches than the first five chapters ; and the narrative 
and oration together give us a lively picture of how Isaiah did 
speak, or preach, there in Jerusalem. 

Isaiah tells Ahaz not to fear any further mischief from these 
two firebrands, now all but burnt out : each prides himself in 
his nation and city, and in himself as the head of these, bu t the 
Lord God laughs them to scorn, and decrees that their policy 
shall not stand nor come to pass, but that they themselves shall be 



* Compare chap. viii. 18. 



t Chap, xxxvi. 2. 



ISAIAH VII. 7 — 14. I THE VIRGIN CONCEIVING. 89 



broken instead, and be no more nations. Yet to this prediction 
of the overthrow of the invaders of Judah, he adds, that Judah, 
too, shall likewise perish if it repents not : 'If ye will not 
believe, surely ye shall not be established.' The reader will find 
in Dr. Alexander, and other commentators, the various attempts 
which have been made to clear up the obscure parallelism of 
verses 8 and 9., and the still greater obscurity of the date 
f sixty-five.' The latter cannot be proved either to agree or to 
disagree with history, unless we could first fix the exact year of 
this prediction, and also of the event to which it refers ; and 
as this has not yet been done, it will be more convenient to take 
another opportunity of considering these specific dates in He- 
brew prophecy. 

Ahaz heard in sullen and incredulous silence ; and the prophet 
resumes, — 

Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God ; 

Ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. 

But Ahaz, who looked on the Lord not as his God, but only 
(like any of his heathen neighbours) as the god of Judasa, and 
as such inferior to the god of Assyria ; and who had determined 
to apply to the king of Assyria, or perhaps had already applied 
to him, as a more trustworthy helper than the Lord, in the 
present strait ; declines to ask a sign, excusing himself by a 
canting use of the words of Moses, c Thou shall not tempt the 
Lord.' He refused the sign, because he knew it would con- 
firm the still struggling voice of his conscience ; and that voice 
he had resolved not to obey, since it bid him give up the As- 
syrian, and trust in the Lord henceforth. 

The question whether Isaiah could have performed a miracle, 
if Ahaz had taken him at his word, the reader will find dis- 
cussed hereafter : only I would here observe that if Isaiah, or 
those who recorded for him the present prophecy, had been 
influenced by that notion of the value of miracles of which I 
have spoken above, and which, however orthodox it may call 
itself, is repudiated by Christ and his Apostles, the narrative 
before us w T ould hardly have been given in its present shape, in 
which the promise of 'the virgin conceiving' is treated as 
a far higher sign than any which could be exhibited in the 



90 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



depths of earth or height of heaven. A comparison with 
Exod. iii. 12., and Isaiah, xxxvii. 30., throws some light upon 
the use of the word c sign' in the present instance, and upon 
the mental state of the speaker and hearers which could recog- 
nise a propriety in a sign of which the force was only to be 
seen after the event. There may seem little difficulty in the 
whole passage to those who are content to 6 take for granted ' 
that it has some good meaning, and to express this feeling in 
the accustomed formula that c the words are a prophecy of 
Christ ; ' but he who tries to discover what the meaning really 
is — what ( a prophecy of Christ ' means — will find need for fur- 
ther examination. To believe in a person, is to trust him because 
we know and love him ; but to believe a narrative, an argument, 
or a prophecy, about him, is to understand it. And to under- 
stand the passage before us, we must understand what manner 
of man the speaker was; what he was actually saying, and 
meaning ; what import his words had to those who heard him ; 
what import they have to us. We must, if possible, bridge 
over the gulf of apparently unknown depth and width which 
separates us from Isaiah, as he stood that day e at the end of the 
conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field.' 

The help which I pretend to offer the reader is slight and im- 
perfect enough ; nothing more than some hints of a method 
which I can follow out but a little way, though I believe it to 
be the true method, which in abler hands will lead to more im- 
portant results. But if we cannot solve our difficulties it is 
something to know precisely what they are, and to state them to 
ourselves clearly. 

The original shows, I think, what indeed is sufficiently ap- 
parent in the most modern and accurate versions, that, on the 
refusal of Ahaz to ask a sign of the Lord's faithfulness to 
His people, Isaiah breaks into an apostrophe — the utter- 
ance at once of an orator and a poet — in which the speaker 
is carried forward by the power of a mental impulse, which 
for the time controls him, rather than he it. No one who 
has listened to a great orator, or even read the words of an 
impassioned writer like Burke or Carlyle, can be wholly un- 
aware that the one and the other is, for the time, possessed 
and mastered by such a power ; — a power which heathens 



ECSTASY OF ORATORS. 



91 



have continually recognised as spiritual and divine, and which 
we have been too much deterred from so acknowledging, because 
we see it employed for bad as well as for good ends, and forget 
that no where in the world of nature is this mysterious mixture 
of good and evil absent. And this elevated, ecstatic frame of 
the orator, as of the poet, is still more marked among southern 
and eastern nations. I am told that Mazzini's denunciations of 
the oppressor, and predictions of his country's future social and 
political regeneration, are at times uttered by him with an in- 
conceivable fervour, rising into the tone of song rather than of 
mere eloquence. The reader's own observation and experience 
will supply him with other illustrations, sufficient to enable him 
to realise this characteristic of the prophet — that he was an 
orator, whose oratory was of the noblest kind, for manner no 
less than matter ; and that, consequently, as often as his love of 
his country and his zeal for his God raised him to the height of 
some great argument, his words necessarily became, and in the 
present instance manifestly are, the expression of thoughts 
and feelings which pass beyond the limits which, in a cooler mo- 
ment, perhaps only the moment before or after, his senses and 
logical faculty would have imposed upon them. The thoughts 
and feelings were really his, and such as the whole culture of 
his soul, intellectual, moral, religious, had made it possible for 
them to be, yet such as nothing but an occasion like the present 
— and we have not yet considered the whole spiritual import of 
that occasion — could have called into expression. Isaiah had 
gone down to the Fuller's Field intending in his own mind to 
address the king in the words which we have in verses 4 — 9, 
and to support this address by such symbolic emphasis as an 
oriental people would feel at the sight of the child Shear-jashub. 
And it may already have occurred to him — or, if not, he took 
it as the fitting course immediately afterwards — to resolve, and 
publicly announce his resolution, to call his next child by a 
name which should tell all who heard it that the riches of Da- 
mascus and the spoil of Samaria should be shortly taken away 
by the king of Assyria; and thus to offer this second, and yet 
unborn son, as a new sign to the king and people, like that 
already given them in Shear-jashub. But his spirit was stirred 
by the behaviour of Ahaz, first to offer any other sign the un- 



92 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



believing king chose, and next, still indeed to couple his warnings 
and promises with a reference to the unborn child, but now in 
language not for that age but for all times : the vision rises 
before him, the bounds of time and place fade away, and he 
says, 

Hear ye now, O house of David, 

Is it a small thing for you to weary men, 

But will ye weary my Grod also ? 

Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign : 

See ! the Virgin, with child and bearing a Son, 

And she calls his name Immanuel. 

These are the words of passion and ecstasy, and as such must 
be read, in order to take the first step towards understanding 
them. The discourse then sinks to a lower level, though with 
a partially renewed vehemence in verse 17.; and the rest of it 
is in the same tone as that with which Isaiah began at first, and 
with the same immediate reference to passing events. 

If the words just quoted stood alone — that is, recorded as 
having been actually spoken, but existing in no real relation 
with any facts of other times and men, — we must either pro- 
nounce them simply miraculous, or else be content with what- 
ever was most probable of the several explanations by which the 
so-called rationalist critics try and reduce them to ordinary 
dimensions, even though it were merely that of calling them the 
words of eastern hyperbole and exaggeration. But the case is 
otherwise : history tells us that a belief in, or expectation of, an 
Immanuel — or incarnate God — has prevailed in all times, and 
among all nations ; and so strong was the vitality of this be- 
lief among the Greeks and Romans, that when the progress of 
intellect had made it impossible for them to retain it any 
longer in its old mythological forms, they revived it in the far 
more monstrous assertion of the divinity of the emperors ; and 
Tacitus, Suetonius, and Virgil tell us of various other shapes in 
which it was presenting itself in their own times of scepticism 
and civilisation. Brahminism and Buddhism are witnesses of 
the same pervading instinct of mankind ; and not less so is the 
reception of Christianity by every tribe of the human race, as 
something not foreign, but most congenial, to their religious — 



FACTS, NOT DOCTRINES, THE CHRISTIAN CREED. 93 



that is, their deepest — wants and sympathies. This class of 
historical facts then are another set of materials, not less neces- 
sary to the understanding of our subject than those by which 
we endeavour to realise a prophet as an actual flesh and blood 
man, who took part in the politics and social interests of his 
time, just as we do now. A third class still remains, though 
even that will not exhaust the enquiry. 

We are not Jews in the time of Isaiah, Greeks or Romans in 
the times of Yirgil or Tacitus, nor is our knowledge of life and 
truth derived from India or Tibet. We are Englishmen and 
Christians, here in the nineteenth century, and we stand on a van- 
tage-ground which enables us to see the relations of things, and, 
consequently, their meaning, in a way not otherwise possible. 
Reader, do you believe in Jesus Christ, who was born of the 
Virgin Mary ? Is that old creed the expression to and for you 
of a series of facts (not doctrines) at once historical, and in the 
inmost relation to your own spiritual and personal life and expe- 
rience ? If not, how can I continue to discuss our subject with 
you by that rational, scientific method, which to depart from is 
to write mere words without meaning ? For non-acquaintance 
with these facts in a student of the Bible is what non-acquaint- 
ance with the existence of the stars and planets would be in as- 
tronomy, or that of mountains and rivers in geology. But let 
us take our stand on the facts of the Gospel of Jesus Christ ; 
let us look for the law in the facts; and then we shall be able to 
examine all past history, and especially the history of the He- 
brew nation, in the light of that law. It then appears that it 
was no fancy, but the assertion of a — or rather the — law of 
universal ethnology, which foretold that in the race of Abraham 
e all nations of the earth should be blessed.' The Romans were 
called to embody and develope in their institutions the ideas of 
law, and of municipal and imperial government ; the Greeks to 
instruct mankind in free inquiry, philosophy, and art ; and every 
other tribe and people, which has not abandoned its duty by 
sinking into mere brute life, has contributed its larger or smaller 
waters to the great stream of human life and progress : the He- 
brews were appointed to set forth and realise in their polity and 
literature the true relation of man to God, and — what the so- 
called rationalist with his recognition of the 'religious senti- 



94 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ment ' overlooks — t the relation of God to man. He who has 
looked into his own heart, and there learnt that his religion, his 
faith, consists not in this religious sentiment, but in God's reve- 
lation and communication of Himself to him in His Son Jesus 
Christ, can then look around and behind him, and see that the 
same God did in past times reveal Himself in several and suc- 
cessive manifestations to and through this Hebrew nation. 
Their whole polity is seen to be a preparation for an universal 
society which is to spring out of it : their whole literature shapes 
itself to become a manual for that society : that fundamental 
idea which philosophers say lies at the root of every nation, and 
by which its multitude unconsciously, and its rulers and teachers 
with more or less perception of its presence, are age after age 
urged forward to their appointed goal, as by force of irresist- 
ible law, was in the Hebrews the idea of the coming of a Lord 
and King of mankind no less than of their own people. They 
could not have been fit for any of these ends if they had been 
less human, and if their polity had been less in harmony with 
the laws of man and the universe than the polities of the Greeks 
and Romans : it needed to be more in harmony, and it must have 
been more so in fact, for more has been able to survive, and pass 
into new and very diverse forms of society. But being fit for 
these, because the original laws and subsequent developments 
of their polity and literature lay in such near relation with the 
ultimate laws of human nature and society, they were thus also 
fitted — fitted by God who has created and governs the universe 
according to the counsel of His own will — to become the chan- 
nel of God's revelation of Himself to all mankind. The question 
whether there actually is such a revelation in the Bible is a 
question of fact, and must be settled by each of us for himself, 
just as each settles for himself on the evidence of fact, and not 
of argument, whether there the sun gives light and heat to his 
body ; but to those who have found such a revelation there, or 
who choose to assume it even for the pleasure of reasoning, it is 
plain that — Christ being the centre of the revelation — all that 
comes before Him will have a prophetic character. All nature, 
all humanity, must be prophetic, if it is progressive, and its 
progress the unfolding of the powers of a law inherent in it 
from the first : the philosophy of the Greeks, the municipalities 



CAUSES ANTICIPATE THEIR FINAL EFFECTS. 



95 



of the Romans, could be nothing to us now if they — that is, 
the law in them, and cause of their existing effects — had not 
anticipated all their present fruits ; and even the warlike am- 
bition, which brought the seeds of these, and many such things, 
into Britain or elsewhere, was a part of the same anticipatory 
working of the same law. And, therefore, much more is it 
evident, that reason and historical science require us to recog- 
nise the like workings in the growth of the Hebrew common- 
wealth and people, and in their relations to their Creator and 
their fellow-men. The evidence of the anticipation of a personal 
Messiah by the Hebrews from very early times, and of its con- 
tinually acquiring a more distinct and positive character, is well 
known to the student of the Old Testament. But the prophecy 
of Micah, Isaiah's contemporary, has a special bearing on the 
subject; he says, — 

' But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, 
Though thou be little among the thousands of Juclah, 
Yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler 
in Israel ; 

Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. 
Therefore will he give them up 

Until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth : 
Then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children 
of Israel, 

And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the Lord, 
In the majesty of the name of the Lord his God ; 
And they shall abide : 

For now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.'* 

Even if we should assume that one of these predictions was 
suggested by the other (though the differences indicate at least 
a partial independence), or suppose both to refer to some earlier 
prophecy, they are not the less indications of a national belief 
and expectation of a mysterious birth of the Messiah. Nor can 
we avoid connecting them with that most ancient tradition of 
6 the seed of the woman ' on the one hand, and with that state 
of the national J ewish mind on the other, which is implied in 
the narratives of Matthew and Luke, who relate the incarnation 



* Micah, v. 2, 3, 4. 



96 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



of Jesus Christ as an event miraculous indeed, yet not contrary 
or alien from the ancient faith, but as the fulfilment of its 
deepest anticipations. 

If, then, we comprehend these two sides of the case together: 
if we see on the one hand that Isaiah was an actual practical 
politician of the day in which he lived ; and on the other that it 
is not the dogma of a worn-out superstition, but the assertion of 
the newest and most accurate philosophy, — the philosophy of 
positive science, — to say and believe with St. Peter, that ' no 
prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation ; for 
the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man ; but 
holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost;'* — if we grasp these ideas at once, we shall, I think, 
have no insurmountable difficulty in the words of Isaiah which 
immediately follow, and in which he fuses into one image the 
birth of the Immanuel and that of his own child, and declares, 
in direct reference to the latter, that before he has learnt to 
distinguish good from evil (come to years of discretion, as we say), 
he shall be sharing the general prosperity — the old proverbial 
blessing f — of his native land, which before then shall have 
seen the land of her present invaders — spoken of as one, be- 
cause its kings were confederate — itself laid waste, after having 
first lost both those kings. In about three years from this time, 
Tiglath-Pileser overthrew the kingdom of Syria, killed Rezin, 
carried away the Damascenes and Syrians into Assyria and 
Media J: it is one of the newly opened questions whether 

* 2 Peter, i. 20, 21. This passage (of which the Petrine spirit at 
least is not questioned); that in chapter i. 10, 11, 12. of the 1st Epistle; and 
Peter's argument in Acts, ii. 22 — 36. ; offer to him who will reflect on them, 
an important, perhaps I might say a complete light, on prophecy, both 
as it appeared to the genuine Hebrew mind, and as it is in itself, accord- 
ing to its philosophic idea. The simple, lowly-wise, fisherman, argues that 
the meaning of these words of David was not exhausted in their application 
to himself, they were not fulfilled in him ; yet that they are not the words 
of hyperbole and bombast, but the utterances of a prophet, of one of those 
wise and good men whom God chooses from time to time to reveal his uni- 
versal laws and plans by ; and that therefore we must seek in history for the 
adequate fulfilment of them. 

t Deut. xxvi. 9.; Josh. v. 6. 

% 2 Kings, xvi. 9. 



ISA. VII. 17—25.: FINAL LOSS OF NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE. 97 



Samaria was not taken at the same time* ; but at least we 
know that he took several cities in the north of Israel, and car- 
ried away the people of all the northern half of that kingdom ; 
and that Pekah's own assassination by Hoshea, followed this 
devastation of his country, f 

Isaiah has hardly uttered the promise of deliverance and 
restored prosperity, when he retracts it. The abrupt beginning 
of verse 17. seems to mark a pause, in which the national sin of 
Ahaz and his people, and the fact that they had already called 
in, or at least resolved to call in, the aid of Assyria, come back 
upon the prophet ; and he goes on to foretel the beginning of 
calamities such as the nation had never yet known. With the 
exception of the temporary subjection of Rehoboam to Egypt, 
Judah had hitherto preserved its national independence : but 
from this application of Ahaz to Tiglath-Pileser was to date 
c its transition to a servile state, from which,' observes Dr. Alex- 
ander, ' it was never permanently freed, the domination of 
Assyria being soon succeeded by that of Egypt, and this by 
that of Babylon, Persia, Syria, and Rome, the last ending only 
in the downfal of the state, and that general dispersion which 
continues to this day. The revolt of Hezekiah, and even longer 
intervals of liberty in later times, are mere interruptions of the 
customary and prevailing bondage.' Ahaz intended to 4 hire' 
the Assyrian razor for his own purposes ; but the Lord would 
employ the same instrument to execute His judgments ; and in 
the consequent desolations of the land, that prophecy of the 
child eating milk and honey would indeed be fulfilled, but after 
another manner than its terms seemed at first to imply. If 
they had believed and trusted in the Lord for deliverance^ they 
should have continued to eat the fat of the land ; but now the 
cultivated fields should be laid waste, and their cultivators scat- 
tered by the sword or famine. Here and there a surviving in- 
habitant, who has saved a young cow and two sheep from the 
wreck of his property, shall feed upon the butter and milk they 
yield him, in an abundance which but mocks the general de- 

* Ravvlinsons Outline of the History of Assyria, p. 15. By the last ac- 
counts Colonel Rawlinson still suspends bis judgment as to the identity or 
otherwise of Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmanes^r, and Sargon. 

| 2 Kings, xv. 29, 30. 

H 



98 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



solation : for their pastures are the hill-sides, heretofore so care- 
fully terraced and worked by man's hand, while the well-stocked 
vineyards which once bore such a high price*, are turned into 
mere briers and thorns, where men go with arrows and with 
bows, to seek wild game, or to protect themselves from savage 
beasts or more savage men. 

Bees may, or may not, abound as much in Assyria as flies in 
Egypt ; but it does not seem a mere fancy of the commentators, 
who see a propriety in the fierceness and stings of the one, and 
the filth, buzzing, and comparative feebleness of the other. f The 
books of Kings and Chronicles say nothing of any intercourse, 
friendly or hostile, with Egypt in the reign of Ahaz ; but as an 
alliance with this kingdom was a part of the policy of the states- 
men of Hezekiah a few years later, it may have been under 
discussion now, or an application even may have been made to 
them as well as to Tiglath-Pileser. That the land of Judah 
was harassed, plundered, and overrun by the Assyrian armies, 
and the collectors of his tribute, in this and the next reigns, and 
not by the Egyptians, will not appear to detract from the sub- 
stantial accuracy of Isaiah's words, if we have once cleared our 
minds of the superstitious and profane notion that he was a 
sort of magician and soothsayer, and employed by God as such ; 
and can realize that he was a man of like heart and mind with 

* The German vineyards are valued at so much a vine, and among them 
the vines of Johannisburg at a ducat each, according to J. D. Michaelis : 
those of Lebanon were rated at a piastre each in 1811, according to Burck- 
hardt ; and this latter sum Henderson calculates to be a half less than the 
price in the text, which was probably high in proportion to the value of 
money. A comparison, however, with Canticles, viii. 11, 12. might lead us 
to suppose the reference here also to the rent rather than the price. See 
Gesenius and Alexander on the verse. 

"j" 'Hvre edvea elcri /xeXiffffdcav aSivdccv, 

irerprjs en yAacpvpris alel veov epxpfxevdoov' 
(3orpv$bv Se irerovrai eV dvQeaiv elapivoicriv, 
at jxiv r evOa aXis Treirorrjarai, at Se re evda' 
&s ru>v edvea iroAAa. vecav 'diro Kal KXiffidcav^ k.t.A. 

Horn. II ft, 87. 

'Hirre /xvidoov abivdcav edvea 7roAAa, 

a'lre Kara (Xrad[xbv iroi/ji.vr]iov rjXdfffiovcriv^ 

&pri ev elapivr), '6re re yhdyos &yyea devei' k. t. A. 

Ib. 469. 



MEN SENT FROM GOD. 



99 



ourselves, — truly sent from God, yet not more truly than each 
of us must be, if he is to do any work, not worse than useless, 
in the world. We may hold this belief all the more consistently 
for believing also that the work of the prophets, and of the 
other Scripture writers, was different from that of any men 
before or since : — ( If the whole body were an eye, where were 
the hearing?' 



100 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER VII. 

ISAIAH VIH. IX. 7. THE SYMBOLICAL FAMILY. ANCIENT AND MODERN 

HABITS OF PUBLIC MEN. SILOAH AND EUPHRATES. THE PANIC OF 

JUDAH, AND ITS REMEDY. GALILEE OF THE GENTILES. — THE NATIONAL 

GLOOM. THE GREAT LIGHT. THE MESSIAH. GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT 

OF THE PROPHET'S ANTICIPATIONS. 

We have seen how Isaiah,, during his late interview with Ahaz, 
was possessed by the idea of a child of his being a sign to the 
people of their deliverance from present invasion. In the first 
chapter of Hosea occurs a like instance of symbolic names given 
by a prophet to his children, and in Habakkuk, ii. 2. we have 
mention of the practice of writing a prophecy on a tablet in 
easily legible characters, and hanging it up in the temple, 
market-place, or other public resort ; from a comparison with 
which the most modern commentators prefer to think that Isaiah 
now merely inscribed ' To Maher-shalal-hash-baz,' on a 
metal or waxed tablet ; — though it must not be overlooked 
that the direction to 6 tie up and seal the testimony,' in verse 16., 
is in favour of the older version, which understands him to have 
made a record of his expectation of the birth of the child, and 
of the significance of that birth, at some length. He wrote 
e with a man's pen,' or 6 style,' — a phrase not unlike our 
' common hand,' or f popular style ; ' and he took as credible 
witnesses that the record had preceded the event, Uriah, the 
high priest at the time*, and Zechariah, who was not impro- 
bably the father-in-law of Ahaz, and a Levite.f He calls his 
wife 6 the prophetess,' as the wife of a king is called a queen 
(says Yitringa), though she does not reign, and, in some old 
ecclesiastical canons, the wife of a bishop a bishopess, and of a 
presbyter, a presbytress ; and thus claims for her a place with 
her husband and children % in the holy and symbolic family, 

* 2 Kings, xvi. 10. f 2 Kings, xviii. 2., 2 Chron. xxix. 1. 13. 

% See verse 18. of this chapter. 



ISAIAH, VIII. 1 — 6.: HABITS OF PUBLIC MEN. 



101 



who are for 6 a sign in Israel.' She gave birth to a child, and 
his name was called, in accordance with the writing, e Haste- 
plunder, Speed-spoil,' that the people might understand that 
before he was old enough to utter the words ( father ' and 
i mother,' — that is, within a short but somewhat indefinite 
period, such as we should express by 1 in a year or two from 
his birth,' — the spoils of the plundered cities of Samaria and 
Damascus, the capitals of the nations now invading Judah, shall 
have been carried before the Assyrian conqueror in triumph. 
That the same child was also called 6 Immanuel,' seems more 
in accordance with the text than the supposition that Immanuel 
was a third son, though the sense is intelligible either way. 

In order to realize the practical impressiveness of such sym- 
bolic acts and names upon Isaiah's contemporaries, we must re- 
member that Jerusalem was a very small town for size and 
population, compared with the notion we insensibly get of a 
capital, from our own vast London ; and also, that there was as 
little in the ways of thinking and living of that age and country 
as in the extent of the city, to effect such a separation between 
a public man's political and personal life as exists in England. 
We respect the domestic reserve of our neighbours, and we 
fortify ourselves in the like reserve, by our habit of learning 
what they are doing that concerns us, through the newspaper 
which we read by our own fireside. Where there were no 
newspapers, and where the climate encouraged an out-of-door 
life, the people of Jerusalem would become as familiar with that 
personal demeanour of Isaiah in the market-place, or elsewhere, 
which he made a part of his public ministry, as we are with 
the mental habits and political conduct of Lord John Russell or 
Mr. Gladstone, though the greater part of us would recognise 
neither of them by sight, and still fewer know anything of 
their personal and private life. 

After having uttered this prediction, and perhaps after an 
interval of time in which the political relations of the several 
states had become further developed, Isaiah proceeds to take a 
view of the whole Hebrew people, whom he looks on as one, 
notwithstanding the actual division and enmity of the two king- 
doms. He sees Ephraim rejoicing, and Judah trembling, at the 
alliance of R-ezin and Pekah ; the one expecting that it will lead 

H 3 



102 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



to the overthrow of the feeble house of David, the other look- 
ing to Assyria as the only protection against that overthrow ; 
but both agreeing in this, that their politics are wholly worldly, 
and have no reference to the government and help of the Lord 
of hosts, the true King of the whole Hebrew people, as indeed 
of the other nations from whom they hope or fear so much. 
The visible power of armies was to them far more real than the 
unseen help of the Lord which the prophet believed and as- 
serted to be sufficient for those who would put their trust in 
Him and His covenant with the nation. The little brook of 
Siloah * might ' make glad the city of God ' with its living and 
never-failing stream ; but what was it in their eyes compared 
with the mighty river Euphrates, which, when it was swollen 
with the melted snows of Armenia — resembling the great king 
who recruited his countless armies in the like mountainous 
regions — yearly overflowed its banks, and covered the whole 

* A rock-hewn reservoir under the south-west brow of Ophel, which is 
itself the south-eastern of the hills which form the site of Jerusalem, 
still bears the name of Siloah, and waters the gardens which still occupy 
the place of those 'king's gardens' for the irrigation of which it may have 
been first made. This reservoir is supplied by a conduit tunnelled through 
Ophel, from a larger reservoir now called the ' Fountain of the Virgin ;' 
and thence the tunnelling penetrates under the site of Solomon's temple, 
as was proved when the Arabs in an insurrection got into the city by this 
channel. The water, which is distinguishable by its peculiar taste and 
look, as well as by its intermittent flow (which Jerome mentions), has been 
again identified in a bath on the north-west of the temple-site ; and although 
more complete investigations have hitherto been prevented by Turkish 
jealousy, these facts would be enough to make it more than probable that 
there is hidden somewhere a living spring which supplies these existing 
uses. Among the military advantages of Jerusalem, Strabo states that it 
was well supplied with water, while there was utter drought beyond the 
walls ; and Tacitus, more precisely, that it possessed a perennial fountain 
with subterranean channels. And from all these things we may conclude, 
with Mr. Fergusson, that this w,as the living fountain, the ' softly flowing' 
waters of which 'made glad the city of God;' and that the complicated 
channels through which it still passes under ground, were probably among 
those works of military engineering which Hezekiah executed (2 Chron. 
xxxii. 3, 4. ; Eccles. xlviii. 17.). The saying ascribed to Mahomet, that 
' Zemzem (in Mecca) and Siloah are the two fountains of Paradise,' is 
worth quoting here. See Robinson's Biblical Researches, i. 493, fF. ; Ge- 
senius, Commentary i. 276.; Kitto's Physical Geography, p. 411, fF. ; Fer- 
gusson's Topography of Jerusalem, p. 69, fF. ; and on Isaiah, xxii. below. 



ISAIAH, VIII. 7 — 16. : THE PANIC, AND ITS REMEDY. 103 



plain with its waters ! Therefore, says Isaiah, this great river 

— this king of Assyria with all his hosts — shall the Lord 
bring upon this people and land. After breaking over Syria 
and Samaria, as successive dikes which hardly for a moment 
delay its course, it shall pass on to Judgea, filling the land 
with its floods, till the monarchy, and the nation it represents, 
shall be reduced to the near peril of a drowning man, whose 
neck the waters have reached : — 

And the stretching out of his wings shall fill 
The breadth of thy land, 0 Imraanuel! 

— c thy land shall be thus overflowed, 0 child, whom, notwith- 
standing, the Lord has set as a sign that He is present with us: 
therefore, however the deep waters may go over us, we will 
still trust in that Lord, and in the promise of which thou art 
the standing witnesso' * 

Trusting in this Name, Isaiah defies the confederacy of 
Ephraim and Syria, and the power of Assyria : their alliances, 
their warlike array, shall be broken ; their counsels shall prove 
foolish ; their resolutious and orders shall fail of execution ; — 
6 for God is with us.' The exact force of the original can be 
apprehended by the English reader, though it can only be ex- 
pressed — and that somewhat imperfectly — by the translation 
of the word * Immanuel ' here, and its retention above. 

There was a general panic among the people ; 6 their heart 
was moved as the trees of the wood are moved by the wind,' 
when they heard that Syria was confederate with Ephraim ; 
their cry was every where, ( a confederacy! has been made 
against us, and we must meet it by a counter alliance with As- 
syria ; ' and the prophet says, i I too should have fallen under the 
influence of this panic, if the Lord had not laid hold of me with 
a strong hand, to keep me in the way of dependence on Himself, 
and if He had not taught me to escape the fear which possessed 

* "Ac si dixisset, terra nihilominus erit tua, O Xminanuel." — Calvin in 
Alexander. 

f There is no difficulty from the original usually meaning a treasonable 
plot. Judah might reasonably apply such a term to an alliance of Israel 
with heathens against her, even if the feeling with which a nation must look 
on any alliance for its destruction, would not justify such an expression. 

h 4 



104 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



my countrymen, by making the Lord of hosts my fear, and 
my dread, by sanctifying Him Himself, as I now in His name 
call on yon to do.' To sanctify * the Lord of hosts is in mind 
and in practice to recognise Him as the holy God, the Lord who 
is absolute (absolutus), free from limitations which hinder every 
other being from carrying his will into full operation : it is to 
believe with the whole heart that God can and does govern all 
things according to the counsel of His own will, that what He 
determines does certainly come to pass, however probabilities 
and appearances may be against the belief. He who thus sanc- 
tifies the Lord cannot fear any other power. Therefore Isaiah 
goes on, — ( Sanctify the Lord, and He shall be your sanc- 
tuary : ' recognise Him as your holy King, and He shall be a holy 
King to you, raising you to share in His own absolute dominion 
over all the powers of the world. He is your King, and you 
are entitled to claim this relationship ; but if you deny it, He 
will not deny it also. If you renounce your rights, He will 
nevertheless require you to fulfil your duties. If you put your 
trust in Him, He will preserve you against till the power of these 
foreign invaders, but He will as certainly cause you to fall under 
their yoke, if you do not trust in Him. Your worldly statesmen 
dream of remedying present mischief, and securing future pros- 
perity, by craftily playing off against one another the barbarian, 
or other, nations whom they cannot hope to match by force ; but 
God will not allow this to you, as He perchance allows it to 
other peoples: He and His covenant will be a stumbling-block 
in your way. He has called both Ephraim and J udah to be His 
children, and to do His work ; and if you refuse, He will as 
really curse you with blindness and weakness, as He would still 
bless you with strength and wisdom if you would walk in His 
way. The greater part of 6 both the houses of Israel' will re- 
fuse to listen ; but I call on you, the small remnant of my faith- 
ful hearers and followers, to wait patiently during the present 
calamities, and to believe that the Lord does but hide His face for 
a time, that the covenant and promise are but closed and sealed f 
with a more formal ratification by the delay in their fulfilment, 

* Compare Numbers, xx. 12.; Deut. xxxii. 51.; Isaiah, xxix. 23. 
f Compare Isaiah, xxix. 11.; Daniel, xii. 4. 9. Also Deut. vi. 8., xi. 18.; 
Trov. vi. 20, 21., vii. 2, 3. 



ISAIAH, VIII. 17. — IX. I. : THE NATIONAL GLOOM. 105 



and that my words and acts, and my name (Salvation of the 
Lokd), and the children (Shear-jashub, Immanuel, Maher- 
shalal-hash-baz),whomGod has given me, are meanwhile His signs 
and pledges to you of the reality of that ratification. This people 
will continue their habit (from the days of Saul and earlier) of 
going to wizards and sorcerers, that they may raise spirits from 
the dead to tell them what to do in times of political difficulty 
like the present ; but do you reply, when they call on you to join 
with them, that it is not of the dead, nor of the sorcerers, who 
with their ventriloquism* seem to receive directions from the 
shrill voices of familiar spirits, that men should inquire, but of 
the living God, and of the prophets who declare His will in 
words of reason and righteousness. Let the people, let Ahaz 
and his counsellor;?, refer to God's law and covenant, and to the 
promises based thereon, which I have even now been commis- 
sioned to deliver: if they refuse to do so, there is no dawn of 
light in the darkness of their souls, nor shall they find any dawn 
to the nisdit of slathering calamities. 

And they shall pass through the land hardly bestead and hungry: 
And it shall be that when they are hungry they shall fret them- 
selves, 

And shall curse their king and their God ; 

And they shall look upward, and they shall look unto the earth ; 
And behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish ; 
And they shall be driven into darkness. 

So completely does Isaiah identify the two kingdoms of Israel 
as one people, on the present occasion, that as the image of this 
darkness gathers itself around him, he contemplates it, not as in 
the land of Judah, but in the north of Israel, in that border-land 
and debatable ground of Galilee, which was politically and 
religiously debased by the intermixture of Canaanitish tribes 
with the Hebrews f ; the chief cities of which neither Solo- 
mon cared to retain, nor Hiram to accept :[; which lay open 
to the first brunt of every northern invasion ; and which was 
actually wasted, and its inhabitants carried away, by Tiglath- 

* The Septuagint translates 'them that have familiar spirits' by 677a- 
(rrpifivOoi. ' Peep' is pipiunt, the ' squeak and gibber' of Shakspeare. 
f Judges, i. 30—35. % 1 Kings, ix. 11—13. 



106 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



Pileser, shortly after the date of this prophecy, if indeed the 
work had not been already begun by his predecessor Pul *, as 
seems probable from a comparison of 2 Kings, xv. 19. 29. with 
1 Chron. v. 26. v. 26,: — the reading of the Authorised Ver- 
sion of our text may also seem to allude to two successive 
invasions ; but it is a reading rejected by all the modern 
translators. And some of these very people ' of Asher, and 
Manasseh, and Zebulon,' f attended the summons of Heze- 
kiah a few years after, and gave a practical recognition of 
the unity of Israel by coming up to Jerusalem to the passover : 

— a fact interesting in itself, and in its reference to the passage 
before us, and also as raising the question whether Isaiah, or 
his disciples, may have taken any steps for the actual promul- 
gation of this prophecy in those districts, and thus by their 
preaching -have prepared the way for its fulfilment. Considering 
how important, wide- spread, and active a body the prophets were, 
and how much evidence there is both in Hebrew history, and in 
their writings, of their extensive personal acquaintance with 
every neighbouring country and people, the supposition is not 
improbable : and so we pass easily from this partial fulfilment 
of the prophecy then, to that day when, on that same sea-coast 
of Tiberias, and in the city of Capernaum, was heard the voice 
of a greater prophet than Isaiah, preaching and saying i Repent, 
for the kingdom of heaven' — a greater kingdom than that of 
Hezekiah — c is at hand.' % 

Those commentators, who protest against our seeing any 
reference in this glorious vision to the times of Isaiah, lest 
we should disparage its fulfilment by the coming of Christ, 

— and their opponents, who forbid us to view it in the light of 
the gospel, lest we should overlook the fact that Isaiah and 
Hezekiah were men of flesh and blood, like ourselves, — both seem 
to err by a too exclusive literalness, and preference of inferior 
logic for philosophic insight. Why should Hebrew history 
alone depart from the law of all other histories, that the earlier 
events must be read in the light of the later, which are their 

*■ We have still to wait for the translation of the annals of these kings : 
in which, however, the name of Menahem, king of Israel, has been read by 
Dr. Hincks. 

f 2 Chron. xxx. 1 — 11. \ Matt. iv. 12—25. 



ISAIAH, IX. 2—5.: THE GREAT LIGHT. 



107 



necessary developments? Why should prophecy be honoured 
by making it out to be a mere verbal soothsaying ? Let me 
entreat the reader, — the Christian reader, — and student of the 
Hebrew prophets, to dread neither of these bugbears, but to 
see and to reflect for himself, in the firm belief that reason and 
faith are ever in harmony, and that neither can ever be rightly 
possessed to the exclusion or neglect of the other. If the 
English poet of the nineteenth century, whom I have already 
quoted, claims ' a vision and a faculty divine ' for his readers as 
well as himself, we need not hesitate to recognise a like power 
in ourselves for the better understanding Isaiah, in these parts 
of his discourses, where, as here, he is so markedly carried out 
of himself. He sees, as we may see too, if we will only look, 
the thick darkness, spiritual and temporal, which was gathering 
over the land, and which reached its height when the nation 
had generally lapsed into heathenism, and Ahaz their king had 
shut up the temple, and substituted the worship of false gods 
even to the sacrifice of his own son to Moloch ; and when 
Ephraim had called in a heathen power to enable it to effect its 
fratricidal designs against Judah, and Judah had retaliated by 
summoning another still stronger heathen nation, and the whole 
land, over which David and Solomon had once reigned °lo- 
riously, lay wasted by the sword and tributary to the Assyrian, 
because abandoned by the Lord, whom they had first aban- 
doned. The people walk in darkness, nay, dwell in the shadow 
of death ! But, see, a great light breaks upon the gloom : mul- 
titudes, full of joy and gladness, throng the cities and the fields 
which just now were deserted ; we hear the shouts of the harvest- 
home, while they present the first-fruits to the Lord*; we see 
the triumphal procession going up to the temple with the spoils of 
victory f ; we see the armour, the blood-stained cloak, and the war- 
chariot, gathered to be burnt, since permanent peace is established 
in the land : we know that they who sowed in tears have reaped 
in joy, and that the King has come to the rescue of His people ; 
that the yoke of the despot, and the rod of the slave-master are 
broken ; and that a deliverance is effected greater even than that 

* Deut. xii. II, 12., xvi. 11 — 15.; Psalm iv. 7. 

f Compare 1 Chron. xviii. 11.; 2 Chron. xx, 27, 28. 



108 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ancient deliverance of Israel from their seven years' bondage, on 
the night when f the Midianites and the Amalekites, and all 
the children of the east, lay along in the valley ' (of Jezreel, in 
this same Galilee of the Gentiles), e like grasshoppers, and their 
camels without number, as the sand of the sea-side for multi- 
tude,' but c ran, and cried, and fled,' when the three hundred 
raised their battle-shout, e The sword of the Lord and of 
Gideon :'* and then we recall the actual debasement under Ahaz, 
and ask, as his disciples must have asked Isaiah, and he must 
have asked himself, and his God — how this vision and its 
promises can be true? I do not quote the mighty w T ords 
of the prophetic reply; but its sense in modern prose, when 
we have somewhat unravelled the many thoughts and images 
which are gathered up into each word, seems to be this, — 
that the believing Israelites are to know that Isaiah's children, 
and especially the second, with whom, in more than one moment 
of special inspiration, he has connected the name of Immanuel, 
though he had formerly called him Maher-shalal-hash-baz, are 
signs and pledges that God has not forgotten His covenant, nor 
His ancient promises of a Saviour — the seed of the woman, and 
the seed of Abraham and David — in whom all nations should be 
blessed ; that this child is a witness that the Lord, the invisible 
King, is now actually among them, notwithstanding the iniquity 
of both prince and people ; and that He will ere long manifest 
His presence and power, by restoring the kingdom from its 
ruinous condition, in the person of a royal deliverer, a Mes- 
siah, of the line of David, f 

And, as Jacob conferred the birthright and blessing of his 
race upon the sons of Joseph by saying, c Let my name be 
named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and 
Isaac' (Genesis, xlviii. 16.); or as the children of Israel in the 
wilderness were warned to obey the angel who went before 
them, because the ' name of the Lord was in him ; ' so the 
Name of God, w r onderful in counsel, mighty in work, the Father 
of their fathers and of their children for a thousand generations, 

/ 

* Judges, vii.- 

•j- To those for whom music not only ' charms the sense,' but also embodies 
thoughts and feelings too deep for words, Handel's ' Messiah ' is no mean 
comment on these prophecies. 



ISAIAH, IX. 6, 7. : tf UNTO US A CHILD IS BORN.* 109 



the eternal Upholder of their race and their nation, and of its 
prosperity and peace, shall be named upon, shall be in, this 
anointed saviour. The eternal kingdom already lies about 
them, though they deny and reject it ; it has its foundations in 
the unchangeable purpose of God, and not in the good or evil 
dispositions of this or that king and his subjects; and there- 
fore, with no material hinderance from the one, nor help from 
the other, of these, the zeal of God Himself will effectually 
carry forward the work, and spread this kingdom of righteous- 
ness and peace, without limit of time or place. Some com- 
mentators think e mighty hero ' a more accurate translation than 
6 mighty God,' as the word (7J5?) is used in such a sense in Eze- 
kiel, xxxi. 11., and xxxii. 21., in the former of which places it is 
applied to Nebuchadnezzar : but we know that the Old Testa- 
ment does not scruple to 6 call them gods to whom the word of 
God came ; ' and I prefer our Authorised Translation, explaining 
it as I have here done. 

It requires a deeper insight into the relative activity of the 
imagination and the logical faculties in the Hebrew prophets, 
and into the degree of definiteness with which — in actual his- 
torical fact — the expectation of a Messiah presented itself to 
Isaiah and his contemporaries, than I possess, to authorise a po- 
sitive opinion how far the prophet, in uttering the words before 
us, was thinking of his own times and circumstances. Yet I 
am unable to form any distinct notion of Isaiah as a man and 
Israelite, and as a prophet of the Lord in contrast with those 
muttering wizards he denounces, without supposing that, at 
this period of his life and ministry, he must have connected 
the thought of 'the Child' with Hezekiah, on whom the 
name of the mighty God had been actually named*, and who 
(being now a boy nine or ten years old), may already have given 
promise of the piety which afterwards distinguished him: — and 
that he would not, at this time, have considered that his prediction 
would be quite inadequately realized, if the youthful prince 
should, on his accession to the throne of David and Solomon, 
renew the glories of their reigns, in which peace and justice 
were established at home and abroad, through trust in the Lord 



* Hezekiah means 'the Lord will strengthen.' 



110 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



and His covenant: — reigns of which the historical facts must 
be studied in the light which the Book of Psalms, and such 
passages as 2 Chronicles, ix. 1 — 8., throw on them. I say, at 
this time, because we shall have occasion to inquire, what was 
the effect on Isaiah's mind when he did see a restoration, under 
Hezekiah, of such a reign of righteousness and prosperity ; and 
whether his expectation of the Messiah did not eventually as 
sume a very different form from what could have been possible 
to him at the time we now speak of. There is a method, through 
this whole book of Isaiah's prophecies, which reflects a corre- 
sponding progress in the prophet's own mind; and this method 
offers us a clue through difficulties which are otherwise impas- 
sable, if we will only hold it fast, and follow its guidance fairly. 



EriC UNITY OF ISAIAH, VII. — XII. 



in 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ISAIAH VII. — XII. EPIC UNITY. OBSTINATE ENERGY OF THE HERBEW 

RACE. — LAWLESSNESS OF THE TEN TRIBES. LEGALISM OF JUDAH. 

THE KING OF ASSYRIA, GODS IN THE IMAGE OF MEN. THE SCOURGE OF 

NATIONS, AND ITS WIELDER. ANCIENT ROADS. — THE KING OF THE 

STOCK OF JESSE. THE GOLDEN AGE. FUSION OF CONFLICTING ELEMENTS 

IN A NATION. CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLT OF EPHRAIM. DE- 
PORTATION of jews in isaiah's time. — the universal church — its 

RELATION TO THE WORLD. THE WATER OF SALVATION. 

The strophical arrangement of Isaiah, ix. 8. to x. 4., is sup- 
j)Osed by many commentators to mark it for a distinct prophecy, 
delivered soon after the last ; while they see in the allusion to 
Samaria, as actually taken by the Assyrians (chap. x. 10.), proof 
that the following prophecy from x. 5. to the end of chapter xii. 
cannot date earlier than the sixth year of Hezekiah. But these 

. arguments are not conclusive. There is no reason why a style 
of discourse in which historical narrative, political oratory, and 
poetical rhythm as well as imagery, are equally in place, should 
not embody in itself a refrain several times repeated and then 
dropped, just as in other instances we find it containing a song 

- or psalm.* Nor shall we find any difficulty in explaining, 
by the ordinary prophetic usage of the past for the future, 
a reference to the taking of Samaria, not more, though not 
less, definite than those which were undoubtedly made before 
the event, even if it be premature to rely on the reading of 
the Khorsabad inscription, referred to above, as recording a 
capture of Samaria just after that of Damascus, and ten 
years before that which was previously known to vis. On 
the other hand, we have the probability of a general ad- 
herence to chronological order in the actual arrangement of 
the book : the indications of an unbroken current of thought f : 
the unity of subject of the whole portion, chapters vii. to 

* Chap. xxvi. 1., xxvii. 2.; and compare the repetition in Amos, i. and ii. 

■\ As is verses 24, 25, 26, of chapter x., compared with chapter viii. 8, 9, 
10.; x. 6., with viii. 1. 4.; x. 27., with ix. 3.; x. 21., with vii. 3. (Shear- 
jaslmb); xi. 1— 5., with ix. 6, 7.; and xi. 13, 14., with ix. 12. 20, 21. 



112 



HEBREW POLITICS, 



xii. inclusive : and, lastly, the probability, of which I believe 
the reader will see more evidence the longer he considers the 
subject, that here, as throughout the book, the author's own 
hand may have been at work, arranging, retouching, and fusing 
together the records of discourses originally distinct. These 
chapters form a kind of epic whole (itself a part of a still larger 
whole), in which the internecine enmities of the Ten Tribes 
among themselves, and with Judah, and the alliances with the 
heathen nations, by which they support these enmities, only to 
involve themselves in the common ruin, are traced to their first 
causes, and the loss of national unity and freedom shown to be 
the consequence of the loss of that spiritual unity and liberty 
which can only spring from, and be sustained by, a living faith 
— in king and people — in the unseen but present Lord of the 
nation and of each member of it : subjection to the heathenish, 
godless, Assyrian power, is shown to be the proper and effectual 
punishment of the national sin ; and a restoration, in and through 
the reign of a righteous prince of the line of David, is declared 
to be certain, because God Himself is pledged to it by a cove- 
nant which men's evil doings cannot cancel. The prophet 
stands as on a hill or tower, and sees the past and the future, 
the distant and the near, in one completed whole, in which all 
events and all wills have but subserved the almighty Master- 
will ; and, therefore, we find here an instance of the propriety 
of the word epic, which has with so much force been applied to 
the writings of the Hebrew prophets generally by Mr. Maurice.* 
In the second edition of the work referred to, this author 
has, indeed, omitted this and much more of formal comparison 
between the Hebrew and classical types of literature, ap- 
parently lest his readers should mistake a vital relation for a 
technical correspondence, and fall into the bondage to names 
which that mistake always brings us. But if we take care how 
we call the prophets 4 epic poets,' and then fancy we understand 
them, we shall find a real light thrown on the subject by this 
word, which is farther explained by Coleridge's observation, 
that epic and dramatic poetry are alike founded on the relation 

* Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 1st edition. See also Educational 
Magazine, vol. ii. p. 226. 



ISAIAH IX. 8 — 17.: OBSTINATE ENERGY OF HEBREW RACE. 113 

of Providence to the human will ; but that while, in the latter, 
the will is exhibited as struggling with fate, in the former a 
pre-announced fate (or Providence) gradually adjusts and em- 
ploys the will and the events as the instruments for accomplish- 
ing its designs : — Aibs 8s tsXslsto j3ov\rj* 

The Jewish historian, in relating the fall of Samaria (2 Kings, 
xvii.) as the punishment of national sin, says, c Yet the Lord 
testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all the prophets 
and all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and 
keep my commandments and statutes, according to the law which 
I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my ser- 
vants the prophets.' And here we have one of these repeated 
warnings, in this ' word which the Lord sent unto Jacob,' by 
Isaiah. The Ten Tribes had already suffered many an infliction ; 
their political organisation had often been broken up by civil 
wars and foreign invasions, as the house of unburnt brick dis- 
solves into mud before the rain ; and the flower of the people had 
been cut down as lavishly as men cut down the cheap syca- 
mores : but with that stoutness of heart, that obstinate tough- 
ness, which, in all ages to the present, has marked this race, the 
men of Ephraim and Samaria seem to rise superior to every ca- 
limity; like Solomon (1 Kings, x. 27.) they will change the 
sycamores for cedars, and they will replace the bricks with 
hewn stones. The conversion of Damascus from an ancient 
enemy to an ally encourages them in their hopes ; but the Lord 
will confound their policy by bringing the conquerors of Damas- 
cus upon them. 

The histories mention inroads of the Philistines into Judah, 
though not into Israel, at this period ; but we can believe the 
latter did not escape, as these marauders were not likely to miss 
an opportunity, especially when once in movement. The 
6 Syrians ' are either the same allies whose arms, on their 
becoming tributary to Tiglath-Pileser, would at once be turned 
against Ephraim ; or the word (Aram) may be used in a sense 
wide enough to include the Assyrians themselves. Tiglath- 
Pileser took Damascus, killed Rezin, and carried the people 
away captive ; and we find Ahaz going there to meet the Assy- 

* Literary Remains, vol. ii. pp. 159. 164. 
I 



114 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



rian ; when it is related that he took the pattern of an altar at 
Damascus, and adopted the gods of Syria, * because they helped 
them,' an account which can only be applicable to the gods of 
Tiglath-Pileser.* 

' The people turneth not unto Him that smiteth them, ' and 
therefore they shall be smitten again and again. It will not be 
a mere political change of an Assyrian satrap for an Israelite 
king, but every rank, every household, from the highest to the 
lowest, shall suffer: — though youth is the season of joy, the 
young men shall find that it is not so, when the Lord, the source 
of joy, has no joy in them ; though mercy and pity are the natural 
right of the fatherless and widow, they shall find that God 
himself refuses them these : and the reason is, that all of them, 
man, woman, and child, are demoralised and corrupted; one 
may be a hypocrite, and another an open sinner, but all speak, 
because their heart believes, the language of that folly which is 
contrary to, and which denies and excludes, the knowledge of 
God. That in the middle of this threatening of universal 
calamity upon head and tail, palm-tree and rush, we should find 
an explanation that the 'tail' is the prophet that teacheth lies, 
and not the common people, as the context demands, does not 
require the supposition of an interpolation by a later hand, as 
some say. We have constant occasion to notice the Hebrew 
disregard of that mere logical balance of sentences which 
indeed soon becomes an intolerable pedantry in any other lan- 
guage : and here Isaiah's knowledge of what the teachers of a 
people ought to be, and might be, and of how great is their 
personal responsibility, stops him, before he can complete the 
explanation of the tail and the rush, and he turns it as though 
he had said, e No, the common people are brutal and degraded 
enough, but the men who have been the cause of this debase- 
ment are more guilty, and more contemptible than they : they 
are the dregs of all.' 

The wickedness of the land becomes its own punishment, and 
burns with a fury which is indeed the wrath of God, while its 
fuel is the people themselves. The images of slaughter and 
fi re — at once fact and symbol — suggest that of famine so despe- 



* 2 Kings, xvi., 2 Chron. xxviiL 



ISAIAH IX. 18 — 21.: ANARCHY OF THE TEN TRIBES. 115 



rate that ' no man shall spare his brother,' nay i they shall eat 
every one the flesh of his own arm.' Ephraim and Manasseh 
were brethren of each other, and of Judah : and the history of 
the kingdom of the former is a history of tyrannies, rebellions, 
anarchies at home ; of wars with Judah ; and of invasions and 
subjugations by foreigners; and even at this time, the assassina- 
tion of Pekah seems to have been followed by a nine years' 
interregnum and anarchy, as far as we can trace and make out 
the lines of a picture of which the indistinctness is a token 
of its accurate representation of the reality.* ' The allusions 
of the verse,' says Dr. Alexander, c are not to one exclusive 
period, but to a protracted series of events. The intestine 
strifes of Ephraim and Manasseh, although not recorded in 
detail, may be inferred from various incidental statements. Of 
their ancient rivalry we have examples in the history of Gideon 
(Judges, viii. 1 — 3.) and Jephthah (Judges, xii. 1 — 6.); and as 
to later times, it is observed by Vitringa that of all who suc- 
ceeded Jeroboam, the second on the throne of Israel, Pekahiah 
alone appears to have attained it without treachery or blood- 
shed. That Manasseh and Ephraim were both against Judah, 
may refer either to their constant enmity or to particular 
attacks. No sooner did one party gain the upper hand in the 
kingdom of the Ten Tribes, than it seems to have addressed 
itself to the favourite work of harassing or conquering Judah, 
as in the case of Pekah, who invaded it almost as soon as 
he had waded to the throne through the blood of Pekahiah. 'f 

The strophical form connects the following verses (x. 1 — 4.) 
with the preceding, as the exclamation with which they begin 
does with those that come after ; and in both are corresponding 
links of the subject itself. The prophet has described the sins 
of Ephraim in a general manner ; but on the mention of Judah, 
he proceeds to denounce what we know from the whole tenour 
of his discourses he felt to be the worst form of the guilt of 
his own people, with a particularity which it is perhaps not 

* Compare the historical accounts and dates, in 2 Kings, xv., with Hosea, 
vii. 7. 

| Alexander's Prophecies of Isaiah, chap. ix. 20. It is worth mentioning, 
that for critical purposes the reader must consult the unabridged American 
edition of this learned work, or its Glasgow reprint. 

i 2 



116 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



fanciful to attribute to his thoughts being now directed home- 
wards. The Ten Tribes were far more ferocious and anarchical 
than the men of J udah : there are many indications in the 
latter of that national respect for law which so characterises the 
English, that it has been observed *, that though history attri- 
butes to us our share in national wickedness, our crimes have 
almost always been committed under colour of law, and not by 
open violence, — as in the series of judicial murders in the 
reigns of Henry VIII., Charles II., and James II. And 
therefore, Isaiah's mind is, perhaps, recurring to Judah, when 
he denounces the utmost severity of God's wrath in the day in 
which He, the righteous Judge, shall come to visit 6 an hypo- 
critical nation,' whose nobles and magistrates decree, and execute, 
unrighteous decrees^ 

To turn aside the needy from judgment, 

And to take away the right from the poor of my people, 

That widows may he their prey, 

And that they may rob the fatherless ! 

They are satisfied that they are safe in their heartless selfish- 
ness, with peace at home and protection abroad restored by their 
statecraft and their alliance with Assyria. But while they thus 
rejoice at home, c desolation cometh from far.' To whom will 
they fly for help when God has abandoned them ? Under 
whose protection will they leave their wealth, their dignities, 
their glory, which they have been heaping up for themselves ? 
Captivity or death are the only prospects before them. And 
yet, as though no judgments could sufficiently condemn and 
punish their utter wickedness, the prophet repeats, 

For all this His anger is not turned away, 
But His hand is stretched out still. 

Where the arguments of the learned commentators seem so 
nearly balanced, and no one shows such an insight into the spirit 
of the whole text as to claim submission to his authority, I do 
not presume to dogmatise : but in such a case we must assume 
something; and on the assumption which I have already pre- 
ferred, that these chapters (vii. to xii.) form one prophecy, the 

* By Lord Campbell 



ISAIAH X. 5 — 12.: THE STOUT KING OF ASSYRIA. 117 



scope of the portion before us will be this : — Isaiah turns from 
Ephraim and Judah to Assyria with an apparent abruptness 
which does but half conceal the real connection, or rather 
unity, of all the parts of his subject : quite ignoring the petty 
statecraft by which Ahaz and his counsellors were brin<nno° 
Assyria upon themselves as well as on their enemies, the pro- 
phet goes at once to the heart of the matter, and shows us the 
Lord come to execute justice upon the nations, and the 
Assyrians as the rod and instrument of that justice ; and lie 
employs the whole force of his imagination to do justice to e the 
stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high 
looks,' in order that he may give more emphasis to the scorn 
with which the Lord, and the servants of the Lord, look on 
his pretensions and power, and that he may bring into fuller 
contrast with this kingdom of the world, which Ahaz and his 
people make the sole object of their hopes and fears, that other 
kingdom which stands, and ever shall stand, in the will not of 
man but of God. The old Babel monarchy, which carried its 
traditions back to the days of Nimrod, that mighty hunter 
before the Lord, and was in all ages the very type of sheer, 
godless, arbitrary power, had, in the time of Isaiah and the 
generation before him, renewed its strength, and become the 
terror and the scourge of all the neighbouring countries ; for the 
Lord of hosts, the Lord of the whole earth, had sent this 
northern conqueror forth, and 6 given him a charge to take the 
spoil and to take the prey.' One nation after another had fallen 
before him ; his satraps sat in the thrones of their once inde- 
pendent kings ; the national gods of ancient kingdoms could not 
preserve their shrines nor their votaries from his hand ; Samaria 
might trust to her golden calves, but they were within his 
grasp ; and the cherubims of Jerusalem, or what other unseen 
images might be hidden and worshipped in her holy of holies, 
would soon prove equally powerless : — thus he boasted, little 
thinking; that he was the merest tool in the hands of an un~ 
known Master, who was exactly limiting his actions by the pur- 
poses for which he was being used. 

'I took the cities, I gave them up to pillage, I slew the 
inhabitants ; 5 or, c I devastated the country, I took away the 
king, with his priests and his gods, his warriors and his wives, 

i 3 



118 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



his gold, silver, and cattle, I carried all the men and women 
into slavery, I brought there the people of other cities;' — such 
are the records which meet us every where in the newly-de- 
ciphered annals of these Assyrian kings, and such the subjects 
of the sculptures which ornamented their palaces. But the 
reference is also constant to the god in whose strength they 
have done these things, and whose worship they have thereby 
established every where : and it is interesting to notice the 
apparent one-sidedness with which Isaiah, here and elsewhere, 
omits all reference to this religious spirit of the conquerors, 
while his words are otherwise (except for the poetry) so exact a 
counterpart of the Assyrian phraseology. It is the one-sided- 
ness of the practical man, who goes straight to the single point 
on which all the rest really depends. The prophet who, without 
phrase of qualification, told the strictly religious J ews that the 
whole ritual which they were practising in exact conformity 
with the law, was an unbearable abomination*, would have 
asserted, in equally plain terms, that the religion of Assyria 
was no religion. God, the living and true God, had revealed 
Himself to Isaiah, and to Isaiah's nation, as the Being in Whose 
image man was created ; and in whom therefore justice, honesty, 
truth, kindness, and every other properly human virtue, which 
in man feebly struggled for existence, had its own perfect, 
absolute reality, without the limits or the defects of the finite. 
This Lord of man, the Jehovah, or I AMf, had made Himself 
known to Isaiah as He had to Moses, and as He does still to 
each of us : and when the prophet turned to look at the 6 gods 
of the nations' he saw at once that they were something different 
— nay, exactly reverse, — in kind. On the one hand, God was 
the prototype of man ; on the other, man of God. The god of 
the Assyrian was made in the image of the Assyrian, was the 
projected form of his own character. The spirit which was 
embodied in that dignified human figure with its eagle's head 
and wings, was but the spirit of the actual Sargon or Sen- 
nacherib, with his wide and resistless swoop, his ravenous maw, 
his royal cruelty. J And when he led out that terrible cavalry, 

* Isaiab, i. 11—14. 
f Exodus, iii. 14. 

| See the majestic figures who have captives flayed, or their eyes put out, 



ISAIAH X. 13.: GODS IN THE IMAGE OF MEN. 119 



in the ranks of which there was no ungirt warrior, no unbent 
bow, no horse's hoof not hard as flint, and whose shout struck 
panic into all who heard it *, when he went forth to conquest 
at their head, from that palace and city of which we have not 
altogether to imagine the magnificence, — we know that the 
winged lions, and the human-headed bulls, whom he took with 
him, full of fierce life, were but imperfectly represented by 
those which he left behind, carved in stone, at the portals of his 
own house, or the house of his god. We may see from the 
vision in chapter vi., that the distinction between the two kinds 
of religion — that which God reveals to man, and that which 
man makes for himself — is not obliterated or enfeebled, but 
brought out more plainly, by the fact that the cherubims at 
Jerusalem were, in other respects, the counterparts of these 
sphinx-like creatures of the neighbouring nations : we see the 
same human element, the same religious sentiment, the same 
capacity for worship, the same human methods of expressing 
this sentiment and capacity : the difference is between the na- 
tion, or the man, in whom this human element is met by a real 
unveiling and communication of God Himself, from above, and 
those in whom it is not so met, and who therefore substitute a 
projection of themselves for its independent existence. At the 
same time we must not, in our objective study of the heathen 
world, overlook that we Christians (like the Jews of old) do 
habitually combine much of this heathenish temper with the 
true faith which has been given us. If we look in any direction 
where the particular religious prejudice no longer blinds us, we 
can see, for instance, how much of the harsh notions which 
Calvin and the Puritans mixed up (as we now perceive so un- 
worthily) with their true worship of God, was the reflex of 
men's ordinary notions of justice, and of magisterial duty as well 
as right, in those days, and which did not shock them when 
attributed to God, because they held them, as of course, in all 
their worldly dealings. So, the new form which the e doctrine 
of election and reprobation' took, in the religious revival of the 
last century, did but reflect the narrow class notions which took 

in their presence; as, for instance, Sennacherib at Lachish, in Layard's 
Nineveh and Babylon (1853), p. 150. Truly eagle-like men. 
* See page 65., above, 

I 4 



120 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



for granted that a gentleman was, and would be to the end of 
time, a finer species of creature than a working man. And in 
our own day, are not the notions of a God who is pleased with 
lighted candles, or whose character is one of mawkish good- 
nature, in which the desire to spare bodily pain has superseded 
all regard for the distinction between crime and virtue, but 
varieties of the same vice ? It is instructive to see these things 
behind and around us, if we take heed that they teach us to 
look within also, — to remember that each of us has his own idol, 
made in his own image, which he is ever substituting for the 
true God, and that from God must be obtained the help for 
discovering and deposing that idol. 

To return to the Assyrian conqueror : — He does not suspect 
that he is the instrument in the hands of the Lord, much less 
desire the Lord's help or guidance ; and therefore, according 
to the prophet's view of things, he does not rely on any god, but 
simply on his own military power and political sagacity. He first 
boasts that he does all things by his own prudence and strength, 
and then dwells exultingly on the nature of his doings : valiant 
man that he is, he puts down one nation after another, taking pos- 
session of their treasuries, transplanting the inhabitants to other 
cities and lands, and obliterating the ancient limits of what from 
independent kingdoms are now but provinces in his great mili- 
tary empire. He has come upon nation after nation, as it dwelt 
in peace with all the fruits of peace, and has c found their riches 
as a nest* :' he has gathered all the earth as one gathers the 
eggs from which he has first driven off the terrified hen-bird. 
But she would hover round her rifled nest, and its plunderer, 
with a trepidating flight and piercing cry, than which no move- 
ments and sounds in the brute creation express more anguish ; 
while these spoiled nations dare not show even such instinc- 
tive signs of a broken heart, but know a depth beyond that 
depth : — 

* Xenophon says of the attempt of Epaminondas to surprise Sparta, — 

eAajSei/ av tt}v ttoXiv oocrirep veorrlav, TravraTraffiu epf)jxov rocv ajxvvofx^vcav. — Hellen. vil. 
5. 10., quoted in Grote's History of Greece, x. 454. This alarm must have 
been as thrilling to a Greek as the danger of Jerusalem to a Jew : and it is 
interesting to notice the universal language of passion in remote times and 
peoples. It is one of the minuter evidences of our common race. 



ISAIAH X. 14—27.: THE SCOURGE AND ITS WIELDER. 121 



For he saith, 
By the strength of my hand I have done it, 
And by my wisdom ; for I am prudent : 
And I have removed the bounds of the nations, 
And have robbed their treasures, 

And I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man : 

And my hand hath found as a nest the riches of the peoples : 

And as one gathereth eggs that are left, 

Have I gathered all the earth ; 

And there was none that moved the wing, 

Or that opened the mouth, or that chirped. 

Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith ? 
Shall the saw magnify itself against him that handleth it ? 
As if the rod should wield him that lifteth it, 
As if the staff should lift up the man ! 

This passage, itself a specimen of the whole context, is 
quite a study, political and artistic : political for him who seeks 
the law of the rise and fall of military despotisms ; artistic, as 
an illustration of the working of the imagination, the i power 
by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, 
and by a sort of fusion to force many into one, .... and 
which, combining many circumstances into one moment of 
consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human 
thought and human feelings, unity, and thereby the reduction 
of the spirit to its Principle and Fountain, who is alone truly 
One.'* And the prophet and poet goes on with the same 
luxuriance of imagination, and the same severity of righteous 
faith. f The Lord, the Lord of hosts, shall send among his 
fat ones leanness :' the allusion seems to be to fat herds, * fat 
bulls of Bashan ;' and these, one would almost say, suggested 
the thought of the oaks of Bashan, if the previous mention of 
the axe and the saw did not seem to reverse the succession of 
the images which crowd in on every side. The 6 glory,' the 
whole equipments and ammunitions, the pomp and the splendour 
of the warrior king, shall be burnt up, and the Light of Israel 
shall be the consuming fire. If the Assyrians are to be thus 
destroyed it is because they are mere noxious thorns and briers, 
only fit for burning. If their power entitles them to be rather 

* Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. ii. pp. 55, 56. These lectures on the 
genius of Shakspeare throw much light on that of Isaiah. 



122 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



compared with lofty forest trees, and their wealth and extended 
dominion to the 6 fruitful field,' with its vineyards, and olive- 
grounds, and gardens, still they shall be consumed, even as they 
have often wasted such scenes with fire in their marches : they 
shall be destroyed utterly, 'soul and body, 5 for they are no 
trees but men, and like men wasted by sickness they shall 
perish. And then, to gather up the whole once more in the 
picture of the heaven-kindled conflagration of the forest with 
its lofty trees and its jungles, and the fruitful fields lying all 
about it, — we see of all these trees, which it would have once 
required many and skilful enumerators to reckon, so few that a 
child can count and write them down, while the child himself, 
in the midst of the desolation, suggests new trains of thought, 
not foreign to the subject. 

If Assyria is to be reduced to such a remnant, so is the people, 
the two houses, of Israel. The Lord of hosts has decreed a righte- 
ous execution of judgment upon his guilty people through the land, 
and though they were as the sand of the sea in numbers, only a 
remnant of them shall be left. But that remnant shall return * 
unto their God and King : they will have learnt the lesson sent 
through so much suffering ; and instead of continuing to trust 
in Assyria, and their alliance with that worldly and faithless 
power, they e shall stay upon the Lord, the Holy One of 
Israel, in truth.' And then Isaiah, with that feminine tender- 
ness which so frequently shows itself in his sternest denuncia- 
tions, hastens to exclaim, ( Therefore, thus saith the Lord God 
of hosts, O my people that dwellest in Zion, be not afraid of 
the Assyrian ; ' it is true that he shall for a time oppress you 
with a bondage like that which in old times you endured when 
you were the serfs of Pharaoh, or the tributaries of Midian ; 
but as the slaughter at the rock of Oreb was an effectual scourge 
to that scourge of Israel, and as the rods of the Egyptian task- 
masters were broken in the hour in which Moses stretched out 
his rod upon the sea, so shall it be now ; for yet a little 
while, and the Lord will stir up a scourge, and lift up His rod, 
and His indignation against His people shall cease in the destruc- 
tion of their, and His, enemies. The words in verse 27., which 

* Shear jashub are the words of the original, where there is also a play 
on Jashub and Jacob, such as Isaiah is fond of. 



ISAIAH X. 28 — 32. : ANCIENT ROADS. 



123 



our version renders by e because of the anointing,' are, lite- 
rally, in the face of (i. e. because of) oil, or fatness, or anointing : 
and it is doubtful whether the meaning be that the Lord will 
not suffer the anointed Israel — the race of kings and priests — 
to continue in bondage to the great worldly, godless, power; 
or that the metaphor of the yoke suggests that of the bullock 
bursting it by the fatness of his neck, or rejecting it in the lusti- 
hood of his strength, as in Deut. xxxii. 15.; Hosea, iv. 16. x. 11. 

From historical parallel and poetic metaphor, Isaiah passes to 
a vivid description of the march of the Assyrians upon Jerusa- 
lem, as it 6 flashed upon his inward eye,' with all the distinct- 
ness of sense. The rival literalists who explain this passage as 
a miraculous prediction, or a narrative after the event, are alike 
refuted by the historical accounts, from which it appears that 
Sennacherib did not invade Judah from the north, but from the 
south or south-west. For though both the traditional name of 
the 6 camp of the Assyrians ' which still existed in the time of 
Josephus, and the nature of the ground which lays Jerusalem 
most open to an attack on the north, make it probable that this 
was the quarter in which Rabshakeh did actually, a few years 
later, e shake his hand against the mount of the daughter of Zion,' 
he would not have brought his army round by the defile of Mich- 
mash. The places here mentioned, and several of which were 
found, still retaining their names, by Messrs. Robinson and 
Smith*, lay in succession between the northern frontier of Judah 
and Jerusalem : and the remains of a square tower and large 
hewn stones which they found at Jeba, opposite to Mukhmas 
(i. e. Michmash), and supposed to be Gibeah of Saul, and the like 
marks of Mukhmas itself having been once a place of strength, 
taken in connection with the accounts in 1 Sam. xiii., xiv., and 
1 Mac. ix. 73., make it more than probable that this was the 
route which Isaiah might reasonably expect the invaders to take. 
The high road indeed no longer runs that way, and Dr. Robin- 
son says that the common approach to Jerusalem can never have 
lain through these deep and difficult ravines : but it has been 
pointed out to mef that while it would sufficiently vindicate the 

* Biblical Researches, vol. ii. p. 110. ff. 

■j* By my brother, Captain R. Strachey. I have since read the following 
like solution of the like difficulty : — " I do not share the doubts which have 



124 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



propriety of the picture to observe, that an Assyrian army 
would direct its course not by what might be the high road, 
but by what was the line of still unplundered towns and villages, 
the geographical probability is all in favour of the route de- 
scribed having been the actual northern highway. For the 
present road, which is so much more practicable, lies along the 
water-shed, where the ground, although better for engineering 
purposes, is worse for houses or cultivation from the want of 
water : and such roads, in which the convenient junction of 
extreme points is the main object, are a comparatively modern 
invention, though the most in accordance with our notions of a 
highway. But in Isaiah's time, even the main roads would 
be those which had been formed, stage by stage, for the 
communication of each town or village with the ones imme- 
diately before and behind it ; and these towns would, in the 
present case, have lain thickest in the very line in question : 
for while the water- shed is just to the west, and 6 lower down 
the slope, towards the Jordan valley, all is a frightful desert,' 
the steep hill-sides, in which these towns were clustered, from 
Anathoth to Michmash, still show signs of that ( strong and 
fertile soil' which (as has been explained before) only needs 
terracing to make the rock a garden, and which, even as it is, 
Dr. Robinson here found producing e fields of grain occasionally, 
and fig trees and olive trees every where.' 

Let us now return, to stand with the prophet on some 
watch-tower of Jerusalem, in vision, and see the enemy's 
troops as they enter the frontier city Aiath, or Ai, which 

been raised about Xenophon's accuracy, in his description of the route 
from Sardis to Ikonium ; though the names of several of the places which 
he mentions are not known to us, and their sites cannot be exactly identified. 
There is a great departure from the straight line of bearing. But we at 
the present day assign more weight to that circumstance than is suited to 
the days of Xenophon. Straight roads, stretching systematically over a 
large region of country, are not of that age : the communications were 
probably all originally made between one neighbouring town and another, 
without much reference to saving of distance, and with no reference to any 
promotion of traffic between distant places. "It was just about this time 
that King Archelaus began to 'cut straight roads' in Macedonia, — which 
Thucydides seems to note as a remarkable thing (ii. 100.)." Grote's Hist, 
of Greece, ix. 23., note. 



ISAIAH XI. 1 — 5. : THE KING OF THE STOCK OF JESSE. 125 

Joshua had once taken from the Canaanitish king : they pass 
through Migron; and, meeting no resistance at Michmash, the 
northern key to the defile, they there leave their baggage, lest 
it should impede the rapid advance with which < they pass 
the Pass,' and establish their quarters at Geba, which com- 
mands the southern exit. The inaction and stupor which had 
allowed this position to be mastered, is now succeeded by open 
panic : Ramah trembles ; Gibeah of Saul — the birth-place of 
the king of whose feats, and the feats of his son Jonathan, in 
discomfiting countless hosts of Philistines in these very defiles, 
the old national stories told — Gibeah is fled ; Laish hears the 
shrieks of Gallim ; and wretched Anathoth * answers not with 
her echoes alone, but with a too real cry of despair, for an 
enemy, whom neither human pity nor fear of religion moves, is 
upon the city of Levites ; Madmenah is gone, and Gebim 
fled ; every hill-top within sight of Jerusalem is covered with 
those terrible horsemen from the north ; at Nob the Assyrian 
is seen to halt, preparatory to the assault, and 6 he shakes his 
hand against the Mount of the daughter of Zion.' At once 
the vision gives place to another; the prophet recals the 
previous promise, with the previous image it was expressed 
under : • — 

Behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, 
Doth lop the chief bough with terror ; 
And the high of stature are hewn down, 
And the haughty are humbled. 
And he shall cut down the thickets with iron, 
And Lebanon shall fall by a mighty hand. 

The root of the word translated ( bough ' means c adorn,' so 
that it is the chief or top bough, forming the ornamental head 
of the tree, which is alluded to. The image is now trans- 
ferred to the state and king of Israel, which is also to be cut 
down to the stump, like the tree in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. 
But out of that stump, and from its living roots, shall grow up 
a scion — one of those slender shoots which we see springing 

* " The prophet plainly alludes to the name of the place (lit. the Answers) ; 
and with a peculiar propriety, if it had its name from its remarkable echo." 
— Lowth, on the verse. 



126 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



up from, and immediately round, the stock of a truncated 
tree.* A king of the race of Jesse shall sit on the throne 
of his fathers, in accordance with the covenant made with 
David: — 

' I have made a covenant with my chosen, 
I have sworn unto David my servant, 
Thy seed will I establish for ever, 
And build up thy throne unto all generations.' f 

The Spirit of the Lord shall not merely direct this son of 
David by occasional and transient impulses, but shall abide 
continually with him, habitually filling him with the spirit, the 
very life, of insight into the principles and laws of God's go- 
vernment of the world, and of discernment how to apply those 
principles to actual circumstances, so as to bring the latter into 
harmony with the former; he shall receive the spirit of true 
statesmanship, enabling him to understand and to rule, not 
ideas and things, but men ; he shall have that personal know- 
ledge of God which is the living source of love and reverence 
for Him ; his delight in this knowledge and fear of God shall 
enable him accurately to discern the like disposition in others, 
so that, with an eye purged from the film of sense, he shall not 
fail to recognise the cause of truth and righteousness in his 
kingdom ; and when he has declared his righteous sentence, he 
will ever stand ready to execute it with prompt and strict 
justice. 

And the wolf shall make his home with the lamb, 

And the leopard shall lie down with the kid ; 

And the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together ; 

And a little child shall lead them. 

And the cow and the she-bear shall feed together ; 

Together shall their young ones lie down ; 

And the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, 

And the weaned child shall put his hand on the crested adder's den. 

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : 

* " Vos modo, milites, favete nomini Scipionum, soboli imperatorum ves- 
trorum, velut accisis recrescenti stirpibus" Liv. lib. xxvi. c. 41. Quoted 
by Vitringa. 

f Psalm Ixxxix. 8, 4. 



ISAIAH XI. 6 — 10. : THE GOLDEN AGE. 



127 



For the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord, 
As the waters cover the sea. 

And in that day shall a root of Jesse stand for an ensign to the 

peoples ; 
To it shall the nations seek : 
And his dwelling-place shall be glorious. 

The latter lines give the reason why this golden age, de- 
scribed in language which Lowth says is not equalled by the 
classical or the Arabic and Persian poets, shall come in the 
days of the righteous king. It is because his kingdom, which 
is the kingdom of the Lord, shall extend its influence over, and 
be recognised by, the whole earth. From the history of the 
reigns of David, Solomon, and Hezekiah, we see that when 
there was a righteous king in Israel, he not only governed his 
own people in wisdom and the fear of the Lord, promoting 
education and civilisation in that spirit of the ancient law and 
constitution which is embodied in the book of Deuteronomy, 
and thus establishing truth and justice, peace and happiness, 
religion and piety, throughout the land, but that he at the same 
time (as we might have expected) exercised a humanising in- 
fluence over the neighbouring nations, gave them glimpses at 
least of the superiority of the Lord God of Israel over their 
own idols, and disseminated among them principles of moral 
and political order which continued to germinate more or less 
effectually, notwithstanding the resistance of national vice, 
ignorance, and superstition. But these, and such as these, were 
but the shadow of good things to come: the acts of Jewish 
kings, like the words of Jewish prophets, were but various and 
partial ways of repeating, rather than of realising, the great car- 
dinal promise made to Abraham, or the great prophetic ideal of 
the Righteous King which was revealed to Isaiah and the rest of 
the prophets. But that better thing which God had provided for 
us, that they without us should not be perfect, is actually come 
in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Son of David. By the mani- 
festation of the Righteous King in His own person, the golden 
age has been made far more actual, and we brought into a far 
closer connection with it, than was possible or even conceivable 
in the days of Solomon or Hezekiah. Then the chosen race 
itself had but a dim knowledge of God, and the nations of the 



128 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



earth could but hear of Him through the testimony of the 
Jewish people and its kings ; but now a greater than Solomon, 
even the Lord himself, is come into each nation which re- 
ceives His gospel and His church, and abides in it as its ever- 
present though invisible King. True it is, that even in those 
kingdoms of the world which have become the kingdoms of our 
Lord Christ, we do not yet see all things put under His feet ; 
the ideal is still far from completely one with, and transcendent 
through and over, the actual, the heavenly over the earthly ; but 
by him who has an eye to see, the one may be plainly discerned 
every where hid under the other, capable of being developed, 
nay, waiting and ready to be revealed in ever new and more 
glorious forms. Our part is to believe this heartily, heartily 
to take our appointed share in the work of realisation ; and not 
the less so, because we learn more and more every day that we 
do work, how small our share, how large God's share, in the 
work must be ; that man's chief business is to 

6 Leave to Heaven 
The work of Heaven, and with a silent spirit 
Sympathise with the powers that work in silence.' 

I have followed our version in the use of the word 'earth' 
in verse 9., though the original might equally be translated 
e land? which would limit the promise of this kingdom of 
righteousness to Israel, as the reference to the c peoples ' and 
the f nations ' in the next verse, compared with such passages 
as chapter ii. 2 — 4., xix. 18—25., is in favour of the wider 
sense. But the idea of the universal kingdom is certainly not 
so prominent here as in those and many other places, being 
subordinated to that of the bringing back c the outcasts of 
Israel ' and the f dispersed of Judah from the four corners of 
the earth ' to their own land and Lord, and of their reunion 
into one people as at first 

"Jacob, in his prophetic statement of the fortunes of his 
sons, disregards the rights of primogeniture, and gives the pre- 
eminence to Judah and Joseph (Gen. xlix. 8 — 12., 22 — 26.), 
and in the family of the latter to the younger son Ephraim 
(Gen. xlviii. 19.). Hence, from the time of the exodus, these 
two were regarded as the leading tribes of Israel. Judah was 



ISAIAH, XL 11 — 16.: NATIONAL REPULSIONS AND FUSIONS. 129 

much more numerous than Ephraim (Numb. i. 27. 33.), took 
precedence during the journey in the wilderness (Numb. ii. 3., 
x. 14.), and received the largest portion in the promised land. 
But Joshua was an Ephraimite (Numb. xiii. 8.) ; and Shiloh, 
where the tabernacle long stood (Josh, xviii. 1., 1 Sam. iv. 3.), 
was probably within the limits of the same tribe. The am- 
bitious jealousy of the Ephraimites towards other tribes appears 
in their conduct to Gideon and Jephthah (Judges, viii. 1., xii. 1.). 
Their special jealousy of Judah showed itself in their temporary 
refusal to submit to David after the death of Saul, in their 
adherence to Absalom against his father, and in the readiness 
with which they joined in the revolt of Jeroboam, who was 
himself of the tribe of Ephraim (1 Kings, xi. 26.) This schism 
was, therefore, not a sudden or fortuitous occurrence, but the 
natural result of causes which had long been working. The 
mutual relation of the two kingdoms is expressed in the re- 
corded fact that f there was w T ar between Rehoboam and Je- 
roboam, and between Asa and Baasha, all their days' (1 Kings, 
xiv. 30., xv. 16.). Exceptions to the general rule, as in the 
case of Ahab and J ehoshaphat, were rare, and a departure from 
the principles and ordinary feelings of the parties. The ten 
tribes, which assumed the name of Israel after the division, and 
perhaps before it, regarded the smaller and less warlike state 
with a contempt which is well expressed by Jehoash in his 
parable of the cedar and the thistle (2 Kings, xiv. 9.), unless the 
feeling there displayed be rather personal than national. On 
the other hand, Judah justly regarded Israel as guilty not only 
of political revolt, but of religious apostacy (Psalm lxxviii. 
9 — 11.), and the jealousy of Ephraim towards Judah would of 
course be increased by the fact that Jehovah had e forsaken the 
tabernacle of Shiloh ' (Psalm lxxviii. 60.), that he 6 refused the 
tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim, but 
chose the tribe of Judah, the Mount Zion which he loved ' (Psalm 
lxxviii. 67, 68.)"* If Solomon had, like his father David, re- 
tained to the last his faith in the one God of Israel, and in that 
maxim of government which David laid down in his tf last 
words,' that ' he that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in 



* Alexander's note on verse 13. 
K 



130 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the fear of God,' and if Kehoboam, Solomon's son, had followed 
in the same path, it is probable that they might have solved this 
difficult political problem of fusing into one nation various con- 
flicting parties and interests, of which I believe the solution has 
always failed or succeeded according as unity of national worship, 
and equal rights and justice, have or have not been established : — 
the centralisation of military force, whether domestic or foreign, 
is not a fusion, but a suppression, and (if it lasts) a destruction 
of the elements of national life. But Solomon forgot David's 
dying counsel that he should ( keep the charge of the Lord his 
God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, and his com- 
mandments, and his judgments, and his testimonies, as it was 
written in the law of Moses;' and his own prayer when he 
came to the throne, that the Lord would give him 6 an under- 
standing heart to judge His people, to discern between good 
and evil,' and to follow the footsteps of 'the truth, righteous- 
ness, and uprightness of heart before God,' with which, and not 
with the arbitrary hand of the military chieftain, or the selfish- 
ness of the oriental despot, David had made it his aim to govern 
* this God's so great people.' * The men were not equal to the 

* 2 Sam. xxiii. 3. ; 1 Kings, ii. 2, 3, 4., iii. 6 — 9. In referring the reader to 
these passages, it may not be out of place to notice an opinion that David's sub- 
sequent directions to Solomon 'to bring down the hoar heads of Joab and 
Shimei to the grave with blood,' are expressions of a revengeful malice in- 
consistent with a character of piety and justice. A moderately thoughtful ex- 
amination and comparison of the various notices of these men, and the trans- 
actions in which they figured, including their deaths, will make it plain that 
Joab, though a faithful supporter of David's throne, was a brutal soldier, with 
an influence over the army which made him independent, not only of the king, 
but of the laws ; while Shimei was a powerful chieftain of the house of Saul, 
and ready to proceed to any opposition to the reigning dynasty. David was 
unable to dismiss Joab, and, in a temper as humane as politic, he included 
the rebel Shimei in the general amnesty when he recovered his crown, and 
declared, ' There shall no man be put to death this day in Israel.' But he 
warned Solomon — and Solomon's mode of acting on the warning gives the 
fair, historical, interpretation of its precise meaning — that these two men 
would be his most dangerous enemies, the one of his person and house, and the 
other (who ' shed the blood of war in peace, and put the blood of war upon 
his girdle that was about his loins, and in his shoes that were on his feet ') 
of his endeavour to govern the nation by civil law and justice, and not by 
force ; and that therefore he must watch them narrowly, and if they did 
again break out, he must not be deterred by a misplaced reverence of pity 
for their age, or the hope they could not do much harm in their few remain- 



CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLT OF EPHRAIM. 131 



occasion, though, by God's proyidence, their failure was made 
to illustrate the political law as clearly as their success would 
have done. And though the student of history feels the same 
regret at this permanent disruption of what should have been 
organic, and mutually supporting, members of a one Hebrew 
commonwealth, as he does at the always frustrated hopes of a 
national unity in ancient Greece ; yet, in the one case or the 
other, a deeper insight into what was possible in the then stage 
of the political growth and education of the human race, 
teaches us that the evil was the only condition on which it was 
practicable to secure the far greater good which was secured, 
and has become a part of the imperishable heritage of mankind. 
The experiments of Sparta, and even of Athens, and still more 
those of Macedon, and, above all, of Rome, show us that the 
problem of how to unite liberty with centralisation, could not 
be solved in that age. And so no doubt it was with the 
Hebrews ; though their worship of One God at Jerusalem gave 
them facilities for true national unity, known nowhere else 
before the times of the Gospel. It has been observed that the 
scriptural account of the power of Solomon resembles, almost 
word for word, some of the paragraphs in the great inscriptions 
at Nimroud. ( Solomon reigned over the kingdoms from the 
river [Euphrates] unto the land of the Philistines, and unto 
the border of Egypt : they brought him presents ... a rate 
year by year .... and served Solomon all the days of his 

life He had dominion over all the region on this side 

the river, from Tiphsah even unto Azzah, over all the kings on 
this side the river.' * And when we thus see on what a pre- 

ing years, from executing strict justice on them. Joab joined a conspiracy 
for deposing Solomon, and Shimei's reason for quitting the surveillance 
imposed on him, was believed by Solomon to be, and probably was, a pretext for 
a like course. Burke, who cultivated his love of justice, and hatred of all 
oppression, by the study of the Bible, and of real life and history, shows 
incidentally that he thus read this story of David, when (in one of his 
speeches on financial reform, I think) he warns his hearers that ' they must 
not spare the hoary head of inveterate abuse.' David did several very cruel 
as well as arbitrary acts : but we need not resign the use of our reason in 
reading the Bible, for fear men should call us superstitious. 

* 1 Kings, iv. 21 and 24. ; 2 Chron. ix. 24. 26. Quoted, with the above 
observation, by Mr. Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p 635. 

k 2 



132 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



cipice Solomon stood, and what his descendants and their people 
might have become ; when we reflect what not only Israel, but 
the world would have been, if instead of a Bible we had had the 
annals of a race of Hebrew Sargons and Sennacheribs, and in 
the fulness of time aKehama — an incarnation of evil — instead of 
a Son of God ; we shall perceive that, if ever man spoke by the 
Spirit of God, or did a deed for which all posterity should call 
him blessed, it was that flagrant radical and revolutionist the 
prophet Ahijah the Shilonite, who stirred up the young sol- 
dier Jeroboam to plot against his master Solomon, and openly 
and successfully to rebel against Rehoboam. At the same time, 
we must not overlook that this, like the other instances of pro- 
phets instigating rebellion, belongs to the earlier history of the 
nation : the later prophets habitually recognise that highest dis- 
covery of constitutional politics, that, in the maturer age of a 
commonwealth, all reforms can, and must, be effected by a dis- 
cussion which, though absolutely refusing all restraint to its 
words, keeps steadily within the limits of the existing laws, till 
it can change them by the power of words alone. Of the in- 
creased clearness with w T hich this momentous distinction is 
apprehended by our non-beneficed classes in England, we owe 
more than is usually acknowledged to Mr. Cobden, and his col- 
leagues in the Anti-Corn Law Agitation. By precept, prac- 
tice, and success, they have made the truth so popularly intelli- 
gible, that we may hope that it is as firmly established among 
us as the case admits of. For, in politics, as in every other 
region of human thought and action, it is not the mere establish- 
ment of maxims and traditions, however rational, but the pre- 
sence of a moral and religious life in the honest and earnest ap- 
plication of these, which upholds a constitution. 

The hope and promise of a reunion of the two houses of 
Israel, which Isaiah utters, are repeated by Ezekiel*: we cannot 
doubt that such a prospect must have animated the pious and 
the wise of the nation in each age : and the historians, in terms 
which show their own appreciation of events such as had not 
been 'from the days of the judges that judged Israel, nor in 
all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah,' 



* Chapter xxxvii. 15 — 28. 



GREAT DEPORTATIONS OF JEAVS IN ISAIAH'S TIME. 133 

describe a resort of persons from all parts of the northern king- 
dom to keep the passover at Jerusalem in the reigns of both 
Hezekiah and Josiah, followed by a general visitation of the 
cities not only of Judah and Benjamin, but also of 6 Ephraim 
and Manasseh,' and e Simeon even unto Naphthali,' for the pur- 
pose of purging the land of the altars, images, and groves of the 
false gods.* And from these statements of almost exclusively 
ecclesiastical historians we may infer, with little danger of being 
carried away by fancy, that there were corresponding facts in 
the civil condition of society ; and that in the transient gleams 
of peace and prosperity which Judah experienced after the fall of 
Samaria and the Ephraimite monarchy, Jerusalem, and the throne, 
as well as the temple there, became the recognised seat of autho- 
rity for such of the people of the Ten Tribes as had not been car- 
ried away by the Assyrians, and as preferred dwelling in towns 
or villages, with the habits of civilisation and of civil order, to 
those of mere pastoral families or tribes wandering in the 
desert at their own will. It was indeed but a feeble restora- 
tion of the times of David and Solomon, or even of the earlier 
commonwealth ; yet perhaps a better state of things than seems 
to have prevailed from the days of Ezra to those of Christ, who 
proclaimed the fact of a deeper ground of unity than that of 
descent from Jacob, and of whose meeting with the woman of 
Samaria we may apply, in reference to this point, His saying, 
that a greater than Solomon was there. 

Ephraim and Judah shall be at one ; the Philistines and the 
Syrians, Edom, Moab, and Ammon, shall again become tribu- 
taries as they were in the best times of the monarchy : even the 
great nations of Egypt and Assyria shall give up their captives, 
— for in that day the Lord will not only dry up the Red Sea, 
as of old, but will extend the same power to the Euphrates, 
striking its deep streams into many shallow ones, and thus 
making a way for his people to return out of both these lands. 
Pathros is Thebais, or Upper Egypt ; Cush is Ethiopia, and also 
Arabia Deserta, along the east coast of the Red Sea ; Elam is 
Elymais, adjoining — and often used to include — Persia, as 

* 2 Chron. xxx. 1. to xxxi. 1.; 2 Kings, xxiii. 1 — 23.; 2 Chron. xxxiv* 
29. to xxxv. 18. 

K 3 



134 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



well as Susiana, and Media; Shinar 3 Babylonia; ffamath, a 
chief city of Syria ; and the Islands of the Sea are the isles and 
coasts of the Mediterranean. 

The Chronicles mention as a great national calamity the num- 
bers of captives taken by the Syrians, Ephraimites, Edomites, 
and Philistines, during the reign of Ahaz.* Joel speaks of 
the Tyrians, Zidonians, and Philistines, selling the Jews to the 
Grecians f, and Amos seems to allude to a similar sale to the 
Edomites.J Isaiah refers elsewhere (chap. xvi. 4.) to Jews who 
had fled their own country to escape domestic or foreign oppres- 
sion ; and in the times of Jeremiah we have like instances. § And 
comparing these and similar || proofs of the practice of the Jews 
and their enemies with that of all the other nations of antiquity, 
we have abundant evidence — even if we are too cautious to 
adopt till after farther investigation the reading^]" of the Nineveh 
inscription, with Sennacherib's account of his having carried off 
the whole population which dwelled around J erusalem — that 
during the reigns of Ahaz and his successor there was such a 
dispersion and captivity of the people as that from which Isaiah 
here promises the restoration. That the fulfilment of this pro- 
mise in the succeeding reign of Hezekiah was most inadequate, 
must be evident to him who sets the outward possibilities of 
the occasion against the unbounded magnificence of the pro- 
phetic ideal : yet it need not be doubted that such a fulfilment 
as the case did admit, would have been brought about by 
the king, and the relations of those of his subjects, who were 
in exile or slavery : for in the latter years his reign, when 
' many brought gifts unto the Lord to Jerusalem, and pre- 
sents to Hezekiah king of Judah, so that he was magnified 
in the sight of all nations from thenceforth,' he would have 
been well able to demand the restoration of his people with 
effect. The reference to the Philistines may be compared with 
Sennacherib's statement that ( the nobles and the people of 
Ekron having expelled their king Haddiya, and the Assyrian 
troops who garrisoned the town, attached themselves to Heze- 

* 2 Chron. xxviii. 5. 8. 17, 18., xxix. 9. 

f Joel, iii. 6. % Amos, i. 9. § Jeremiah, xli. xlii. 

(J As 2 Kings, xv. 29., xvii. 6. 18. 

^[ Rawlinson's Outline, p. 23. The translation of Dr. Hincks, as given 
by Mr. Layard {Nineveh and Babylon, p. 143.), is less distinct on this point. 



ISAIAH XII.: THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS. 135 

kiah of Judaea, and paid their adorations to his God.'* The 
smiting the Euphrates into seven streams, Grotius, with his 
wonted clear and practical appreciation of fact and history, 
refers to the partial dismemberment of Assyria by the defection 
of the Medes and Chaldees, which, according to Herodotus, 
took place about the same time with Sennacherib's retreat from 
the invasion of Judaea and Egypt : for the reconciliation of the 
Greek historian with the native records, we must wait till they 
are more thoroughly deciphered and translated. 

The prophet finally concludes this prophecy, the structure of 
which we have so often paused to admire in its various parts, 
with a hymn, after the manner of those which, in the Book of 
Psalms, have these two thousand years been reckoned among the 
most precious treasures of men, women, and children, all over 
the world. It is a hymn of the restored church, which Isaiah 
puts into her mouth ( in that day.' I say the restored church, 
rather than the nation, because the whole matter as well as tone 
of the hymn — as indeed the name hymn would signify — marks 
that Church is the proper word here. It is as impossible to un- 
derstand the history and literature of ancient Israel, as it is 
those of modern France, Germany, or England, if we are ignorant 
of, or do not duly appreciate, the presence and influence of the 
church in each. And by the church of the Hebrews I do not 
here mean their national and endowed priesthood, with its pre- 
scribed laws and rituals for national worship and education, and 
which are analogous to the like institution among ourselves ; I 
speak of that spiritual brotherhood of which the ecclesiastical 
e estate of the realm' in any nation is the proper symbol, and 
which embodies and expresses itself in and by that symbol in as 
far as it can ; but which cannot limit itself to that or any other 
earthly form, because it is itself heavenly, and transcends all 
the partial and imperfect forms of earth, even when they are at 
their best, and still more so when (as often happens) they have 
become deeply, or even hopelessly, corrupted and decayed. This 
brotherhood has God for its father, and for its elder brother and 
head the Son of God, whom the beloved Apostle beheld in 
vision, while ( ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands 



* Rawlinson's Outline, p. 23. 
k 4 



136 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



of thousands,' sang — 6 Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us 
to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and 
people, and nation ; and hast made us unto our God kings and 
priests; and we shall reign on the earth.' And what St. John 
contemplated and declared with the eye and tongue of the old 
Hebrew seers, St. Paul has set forth in the language and by the 
methods of European philosophy ; while the life and substance 
of the teaching of both is contained in the last discourses of 
their Master and ours, who said, 6 Neither pray I for these 
alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their 
word ; that they all may be one ; as thou, Father, art in me, 
and I in thee, that they also may be one in us : that the world 
may believe that thou hast sent me.' The world and the church 
are the two universal opposites : not the world merely in some 
particularly bad sense, but in all senses, good and bad ; — the 
world which hates and resists the church with active enmity ; 
the world which hinders the church by its indifference, selfish- 
ness, corruption, and decay ; and also the world into which the 
church is in all ages infusing its own, or rather its Lord's, un- 
worldly, heavenly spirit ; which shall be at last entirely renewed 
by that spirit, and shall c believe ' that the church, and the 
Lord of the church, were indeed sent by the Father of all, that 
his Name may be glorified in and through all. This church, 
which Socrates and Plato hoped to find, and dwell in, after 
death*, but which Jesus Christ and his Apostles tell us, and 
we know— unless we shut our eyes to the truth — is actually 

* " This law of degeneracy [according to Plato] exists in the com- 
monwealths of the earth, just because they have not understood and 
steadfastly contemplated that original model, that perfect idea of a common- 
wealth, which is also the original model and perfect idea of a human cha- 
racter. It is a contradiction and absurdity then to allege the fact of this 
degeneracy as a proof that no such model is to be found. But after all 
these inquiries does the thought still linger about the mind, where is it to be 

found ? Plato answers (book ix. p. fin.), 'AAA.' iv ovpavcp Xffws irapaZ^iyfJia ava- 
k€ltcli tw fiov\o/j.6vcp bpav Kai opGivTi kavrbv KaToiKi^€iv '. Is it wonderful that sucti 
words should have suggested to some of the Christian fathers the recollection 
of those words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which describe the hopes of the 
head of the covenanted people, 'E^eSexero yap tV robs 9e/j.e\lovs ix ovffav ir6xiv 
7)s r€x^LTf]s nai Srj/juovpybs 6 ©eJs ; or those which describe this hope as accom- 
plished, 'Hficov rb iroxlreviia iv ovpavols iWpx" ? " — Maurice's Moral and Meta- 
physical Philosophy, pp. 153, 154. (2nd Edition.) 



DIFFERENT ANTICIPATIONS OF ISAIAH AND JEREMIAH. 137 

set up and open, upon earth, was to the Hebrew nation neither 
a mere future hope, nor a complete present possession. It was 
present, but present in the germ, and not in the fruit or flower. 
It deepened, sanctified, spiritualised their family relations, and 
their national life, literature, and worship ; we see it pervading 
their traditions, history, laws, and the writings of their psalmists 
and prophets, and forming the channel through which God 
6 spake to them at sundry times and in divers manners ; ' but 
we see also that the prophets themselves, when most conscious 
of the reality of the divine Word and Spirit imparted to them, 
felt that they wanted something more, namely, a universal 
instead of a partial, occasional, measured, gift of the Spirit. 
e The Holy Ghost was not yet given' (that is, not ( without 
measure,' as it is elsewhere expressed) e because that Jesus was 
not yet glorified ; ' and therefore, though the prophets knew that 
their nation had really been based from the first upon God's 
covenant, and upheld by his presence as their Lord, still they 
felt that they needed ( a new covenant,' and looked forward to 
a day when the Lord should put his law in their hearts, and 
when they should no more have occasion to teach each other 
how to know the Lord, because not merely lawgivers, kings, 
and prophets, but the humblest peasant and child, should know 
Him for himself.* It may be said that we are even now no 
better off than they were, for it is the world and not the church 
which still predominates everywhere ; and that we think our- 
selves happy if we can infuse some little spiritual life into cor- 
rupt and decayed family and national institutions, while the 
expectation of their perfect renewal by the presence and power 
of a universal and heavenly brotherhood set up among us here 
on earth, is but a hope for the remotest future, if even that. 
True ; our Christian faith has sunk not merely to the level of 
the Jewish prophet, but to that of the Greek philosopher: 
we hope that perhaps we may find what we want in some other 
world after death. But the difference between them and us is 
that both of them believed and accepted all that it was given 
them to know, but we do not. The Kingdom of God is mani- 
fested among us, but we deny its presence. We deny it so- 

* Jeremiah, xxxi. 31 — 34. 



138 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



cially even when we seem to acknowledge it individually ; and 
the consequent taint and curse of worldliness which pervades 
every thing, even our religion, can only be got rid of in pro- 
portion as our social as well as our individual life is renewed 
by faith in Christ, who, being the Head, is the source of life in 
all the relations which the members of the body have with one 
another.* 

But while we recognise this distinction of the Jew from the 
Christian as well as from the Gentile, — that the first had the 
church, though yet in its germ and promise, — it does not follow 
that we are to disregard the various and successive stages of its 
development among the Jews themselves. And in this and the 
other earlier prophecies of Isaiah, we should go much against 
their actual language and tone, as well as against probability, 
if we supposed that the youthful patriot grown up in the pros- 
perous reigns of Uzziah and Jotham, and having seen only two 
or three years of national calamity, was looking at things as 
Jeremiah looks at them in the passage quoted above, when a 
moral and material decay of many generations had brought the 
commonwealth to the lowest depression, and spiritual hope was 
stimulated by the utter despair of earth. It is more in ac- 
cordance with all the facts to believe that Isaiah, when he puts 
this hymn in the mouth of the remnant of the Lord's people, 
recovered from the four corners of the earth, was anticipating 
such a restoration of the national church as he did witness a few 
years after, in the reign of the pious Hezekiah, — a restoration 
which consisted not merely in the re-opening the temple, and 
re-establishing the daily worship and the yearly festivals, but 
much more in the humble, holy, devout spirit of repentance, 
hope, and faith, in which the king and people confessed before 
God that it was for their sins that ( their fathers had fallen by 
the sword, and their sons, and their daughters, and their wives, 
were in captivity ; ' and that they now s turned again to Him, 
the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, believing that 
He would return to the remnant of them who were escaped out 
of the hand of the kings of Assyria, and that their brethren and 

* The reader will see that I have followed Coleridge's exposition of the 
relation of the universal to a national church, in his essay on Church and 
State. 



ISAIAH XII. 3. : THE WATER OF SALVATION. 



139 



their children would find compassion before them that led them 
captive, so that they should come again into their own land, 
because the Lord their God was gracious and merciful, and 
would not turn away his face from them, if they returned 
to Him.' * The historical narrative is indeed a striking counter- 
part of the prophecy ; the influence of the man who uttered the 
latter is manifest in the proceedings chronicled by the former; 
and each makes the other a thoroughly intelligible and co- 
herent portion of one history. 

The Talmudists refer the words, 4 With joy shall ye draw 
water out of the wells of salvation,' to the custom of making an 
oblation of water on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, 
when a priest fetched water in a golden pitcher from the foun- 
tain of Siloah, and poured it mixed with wine on the morning 
sacrifice as it lay on the altar : while at the evening offering the 
same was done amidst shouts of joy from the assembled people. 
It was in obvious allusion to this rite that, 6 in the last day, 
that great day of the feast, J esus stood and cried, saying, If any 
man thirst let him come unto me and drink ; ' but as it is not 
prescribed in the law of Moses, it has been doubted whether it 
dates back earlier than the times of the Maccabees. It is, how- 
ever, at least as probable that the Asmonean princes should have 
restored an ancient, as ordained a new rite : such a rite, to 
acknowledge God's gift of the water without which harvest and 
vintage must have failed, would always have been a likely ac- 
companiment of the feast in which these were celebrated ; and 
the like acts of Samuel and Elijah, though for different pur- 
poses, perhaps go in confirmation of the ancient existence of 
such a practice.! Be this as it may, the idea conveyed by 
the image of the living water will be the same : — i Such as is 
the refreshment of water from the spring, and from the clouds 
of heaven, to the parched lips and the thirsty land, in this our 
sultry climate, such shall be the refreshment to your spirit in 
that day from the salvation of the Lord. He shall dwell among 
you, and His Spirit shall be a well of life to the whole nation,' 

* 2 Chronicles, xxix. xxx. xxxi. 

\ 1 Samuel, vii. 6. ; 1 Kings, xix. 33 — 35. 



140 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Isaiah xiii., xiv. — genuineness of the prophecies on babylon. — scep- 
tical CRITICISM ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS NOT POSITIVE OR CON- 
structive. orthodox criticism. results op the controversy. 

traditional comments confounded with the text. hebrew his- 
torical notices of babylon assyrian notices. babylon sacked 

in isaiah's time by Persians, and perhaps by medes. — babylon a 

diagram or ideograph. arguments from style. suspense better 

than hasty decision. final overthrow of the empire of force. 

e The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amos did 
see.' A number of learned modern commentators of Germany 
maintain that the 6 higher criticism,' as they name it, has 
ascertained this title to be spurious, and the prophecy at the 
head of which it stands, as well as several others in the book, 
and especially chapters xl. to lxvi., to have been written towards 
the end of the great Babylonish Captivity. But this 6 higher 
criticism' is not the constructive criticism by which a Niebuhr 
and a Grote have restored the political histories of Borne and 
Greece ; but that negative, eighteenth-century criticism, that 
c victorious analysis,' which Niebuhr taught us how to escape 
from, or rather to make our servant instead of our master. And if 
it still asserts its power in the region of biblical literature, and 
especially in the question of the genuineness of the writings of 
Isaiah, it is not the less on the eve of becoming obsolete here as 
elsewhere, in that respect in which it most prides itself. For 
antiquarian research, sceptical questioning, skilful anatomy, refu- 
tation of the credulous or fraudulent figments of writers or 
commentators, and for sweeping away by these means every 
kind of accumulated rubbish, the negative criticism is, and 
will continue to be, invaluable, not only to other students, but 
to the student of the Bible, in as far as it is applicable to his 
subject-matter. But the mechanical and logical arrangements 
by which it proposes to frame a substitute for what it has, or 
supposes it has, destroyed, are now understood not to be really 
constructive in the sense which science demands, and declares 
possible. It does not discover the law in the simpler facts, and 



RISE OF THE SPECULATIVE CRITICISM ON ISAIAH. 141 



then explain the more complicated facts by that law : but it 
starts with a theory, and makes the facts fit this theory by 
learned and ingenious adaptations, or if they are quite intract- 
able, rejects them, declaring that it has a i critical feeling' that 
they are not genuine. It is no jest to say that f Tant pis pour 
les faits ' is one of its main arguments. But we want facts, and 
laws, not speculations ; and therefore this speculative criticism, 
though it may dress itself in the newest fashion of philosophy, 
cannot maintain its ground, except because there is nothing 
better to take its place. It bears the same relation to the really 
scientific criticism which a thoughtful student of the Bible so 
greatly longs for, as the speculations of the 6 Vestiges of Crea- 
tion' do to the positive sciences of which the foundations are 
slowly but surely laid in the observations and inductions of a 
Herschel, a Lyell, a Pritchard, or a Latham. The difference 
between science and theory is finally established, and hence- 
forth the latter has only to give way before the former, and 
that in moral and religious no less than in physical inquiry. 
Into the general question of the relation of the so-called ortho- 
dox and rationalist* systems of biblical criticism to each other, 
and to that scientific method which we have still to wait for, 
this is not the place to enter ; but as to the point immediately 
under consideration, the state of the case seems to be this : — 

In 1786 Bishop Lowth published his work on Isaiah, in which, 
while lie recognised the ordinary orthodox views of prophecy, 
it was his main object to exhibit Isaiah as a poet not inferior to 
the great classical models, and to remove the obstacles to his 
being duly appreciated as such, partly by literary illustrations, 
and partly by a new translation in which many real errors or 
obscurities of the authorised version were avoided, while the 
whole was made to assume a form more in accordance with clas- 
sical, or supposed classical, canons. The last point he endea- 
voured to attain by a free use of conjectural emendations — his 
own, and those of ancient versions or modern scholars — of the 

* Convenient as these terms are for making a general statement, I should 
have feared to countenance, by the use of them, the base practice of pointing 
arguments with nicknames ; but I find them employed as honourable titles, 
— the one by Dr. Alexander, in the Introduction to his Commentary, 
p. xxxi. ; and the other by M. Bunsen, in Hippolytus and his Age, i. 164. 



142 



HEBKEW POLITICS. 



text, in places of which it was not then seen that they were 
already in harmony with the canons of Hebrew, and often even 
of English taste, and could only be injured by being altered. And 
though these particular conjectures were soon set aside by He- 
brew scholars, as wanting alike in authority and probability, 
yet the spirit of them would not so easily die, for it was that 
which animated the whole criticism of the age. Lowth had 
employed himself in making it clear that Isaiah was a real poet : 
certain of his German cotemporaries and successors proposed to 
prove that he was a real patriot, politician, and man of flesh and 
blood, like Socrates, or Cicero, or the men of the eighteenth 
century itself. Not that the orthodox commentators denied, or 
did not recognise, these characteristics of the Hebrew prophet. 
But these commentators were men, many of whom, if not all, had 
learnt by personal experience that they had a nearer and deeper 
interest in the words of Isaiah than in those of any patriot or 
politician, ancient or modern ; and they had accepted the com- 
mon explanation of this experience of the whole Church, as well 
as themselves, — c that Isaiah was inspired, and his prophecies a 
part of the revelation of God to man : ' and, moreover, they had 
adopted, and were employing all their learning and ingenuity to 
maintain, the notion — in former times floating vaguely on the 
surface of a deeper and truer belief, but now reduced to a co- 
herent system — that not only was ( all Scripture given by in- 
spiration,' but that (contrary to the constant declaration of 
Scripture itself) inspiration was confined to the writers of 
Scripture, and consisted not in the perpetual presence and in- 
dwelling of the Holy Spirit in the church, and in each member 
of the church, but mainly and eminently, though not entirely, 
in special miraculous (by which they meant arbitrary) commu- 
nications from God through the prophet or apostle, who was 
himself little more than a mechanical instrument for the purpose. 
And, therefore, while such commentators as the great Vitringa 
gave a predominance to the religious and Christian interest of 
Isaiah's prophecies, to which it can only be objected that it is 
shown apart from their national and human interest, instead of 
in the entire union in which the two stand together in the pro- 
phecies themselves, we find them maintaining that these pro- 
phecies are full of miraculous predictions of future events, which 



GENUINENESS OF ISAIAH'S WRITINGS. 



143 



could only have been made known to the prophet because 
God had seen fit to suspend or supersede the laws of nature and 
the human mind for the occasion. Here, then, came in the neo- 
logical or rationalist critics, who replied, — that a more extensive 
and accurate, as well as a less prejudiced, examination and com- 
parison of the literature, antiquities, history, philosophy of the 
Hebrews and of other nations, would show that a great part of 
the phenomena in question, including those of the writer's own 
belief in spiritual and divine influences and interpositions, were 
merely human and ordinary, and such as were habitually recog- 
nised to be so by these very orthodox commentators if found in 
classical or modern history : — that they admitted that there still 
remained a large number of predictions of future events in 
the book of Isaiah, which could not be thus disposed of, but 
that here the art of the e higher criticism,' by which the com- 
mentator trained to its exercise could decide what were and what 
were not the genuine works of an author, however ancient, 
was available : — that this criticism did in fact set aside all 
the positive, matter-of-fact, evidence which the document itself 
offers, and decide that all the supposed miraculous predictions of 
Isaiah were written either after the event, or when it was so close 
at hand as to be cognisable by an acute observer, and might 
therefore, be confidently ascribed, not to Isaiah, but to a writer or 
writers living in Babylon towards the end of the captivity, who 
imitated his style more or less successfully, and whose works were 
presently assumed and maintained to be his, either in order to give 
greater weight to his promises and warnings by a venial, or 
perhaps commendable fraud, or else through the ignorance or 
carelessness of copyists, their deficiency of separate parchments, 
or other accidents which the critical tact of the several commen- 
tators and readers might prefer to suppose : — while, lastly, the 
assertion that the words of the prophet do actually reveal to the 
Christian a knowledge of God and of His will, not otherwise 
discoverable, the rationalist, except in as far as he explained or 
got rid of it by the foregoing arguments, passed in silence, like 
the German translation, or abridgment, of Vitringa, c aus wel- 
cher alle die ungeniessbaren mystichen Erklarungen weggefallen 
sind.' But this practice of ignoring facts, whether historical, 
or those facts of consciousness which supply so large a part of 



144 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the materials of any tolerable philosophy of human life, cannot, 
as the sceptic always fancies, stop just where he pleases. His 
whole mind is influenced by it, and accordingly his views of 
Hebrew and other national politics and literature not only re- 
quire the support of innumerable theories and conjectures, but 
they are after all unsatisfactory from their narrowness. Vi- 
tringa, with all his f unpalatable mystical interpretations,' is 
less of a mere book-student than Gesenius, and knows more 
what a flesh and blood man is like. 

No one, indeed, can bring a charge of narrowness or super- 
ficiality against Ewald, who has thrown more light upon the 
real nature of prophecy than any one, except our own country- 
man Maurice; yet this makes it the more instructive to see 
how, in all these questions of criticism, his ( shaping spirit of 
imagination' is so strong, that its creations have to him all the 
reality of historical facts. Thus, on the subject before us, he 
says *, that though we cannot trace the history of the existing 
collections of the prophecies, by external evidence, yet we may, 
by help of that which is internal or derived from analogy, ar- 
rive at some extremely weighty truths, which present themselves 
to us as scattered marks and vestiges of that history. And then 
he proceeds to give, not some of those general and philosophical 
views in which he is such a master, but a series of historical, or 
quasi-historical/ statements as to the period at the end of the 
exile of which we have no ( external ' accounts. He says, that e at 
that time a multitude of new prophecies, often of great poetical 
beauty, and written, as it were, on thousands of flying sheets, 
were published and collected ; and that it is easy to understand 
how this flood of new writings soon made it seem expedient to 
make and circulate new selections of the most important of the 
old works on prophecy.' And he then gives, in great detail, a 
narrative of the steps by which one of these selectors arranged 
the Book of Isaiah as we now have it, even pointing out two 
little passages which the said selector ( tf whom one may easily 
give credit for being something of an author himself '), added to 
give a finish to certain sections of the work. Parts of this nar- 
rative are qualified with such words as ( probably,' ' easily con- 
ceived,' &c, but others are not less supported by the counter- 

* Die Propheten, i. 55-60. 



IMPORTANT RESULTS OF THE CONTROVERSY. 145 



vailing ( manifestly/ or f undeniably; ' and the whole is such a 
statement of events which happened, without being recorded, 
2200 years ago, as no Englishman would venture to make, with 
all the documents before him, of the manner in which the 
works of any author of his own generation were composed and 
arranged. Ewald has (as his readers know) farther employed 
this supposed power of recovering the past, in re-arranging the 
whole of the Prophets as well as the Psalms, as they 'must ' have 
been, and has printed his versions accordingly. I point out 
these things, not from any disposition to carp at this wise 
and good man, nor even for their interest to the student of 
the national distinctions of the human mind, but because I be- 
lieve that we must understand them, in order to understand 
this question of the Isaian, or non-Isaian, authorship of these 
chapters. For he must be very ignorant and conceited who is 
not often ready to think that these Germans are so wise, and 
their insight so deep, that we ought to take their authority on 
this point, though their arguments seem so inconclusive. And 
such instances as that above, explain clearly what are the proper 
limits of the Germans' authority, and where we must begin to 
judge for ourselves. They offer us diamonds and glass beads as 
of equal value : we may know the difference, though they alone 
know where to find the former.* 

The controversy, however, has not been without fruit, and 
it promises more hereafter. The opposite and equally arbitrary 
modes of appealing on every difficulty either to a miracle, or to 
a supposition that the text ought to be what it is not, will be 
seen to be alike unnecessary in order to explain the facts of the 
case, when we have learnt how to look at those facts in a 
stronger and clearer light, derived from a deeper knowledge of 

* M. Bunsen says, " Modern criticism has been left to the Germans, for 
whom reality has no charm." And of "the Protestant critical school in 
Germany," he adds — " what they know how to handle best is thought, the 
ideal part of history ; what is farthest from their grasp is reality." — Hippo- 
lytus and his Age, ii. 228. 239. I do not mean to say that M. Bunsen would 
make my application of his maxims. 

If it is said that even the Germans think Ewald fanciful, I would reply 
that, in this question of the genuineness of Isaiah's writings, Gesenius and 
Hitzig are quite as regardless of fact and evidence, and quite as hypotheti- 
cal, as Ewald. 

L 



146 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the laws according to which God has both created men j and is 
still ruling and guiding them, both as to their inward and their 
outward life. It is impossible to glance at the progress of this 
controversy during the last sixty or seventy years, without 
seeing the marked approaches that have been made on both 
sides towards a union on the common ground of a positive 
theology and criticism. On the one hand we are learning that 
in proportion as we can discover the law of God's working in 
events where our predecessors only saw His power, and can, 
consequently, perceive the resemblances between God's former 
and present manner of governing the world where they saw 
chiefly the differences, this does not dishonour but honour God, 
and instead of weakening our recognition of the reality of God's 
presence and power in our own souls, does in truth add a new 
and stronger evidence of it to ourselves and to others. And, 
meanwhile, we have been discovering on the other side, that, 
in order to sustain the assertion that the Hebrew prophet was 
a real poet, orator, patriot, and man, we must get some higher 
and more catholic standard of what poetry, oratory, patriotism, 
and manhood are, than the stunted specimens of student or 
town life in the eighteenth century, or indeed any other cen- 
tury, could supply us with; and it is now becoming plain that 
these efforts to realise the human character of prophecy will not 
stop in their ever-increasing demands for a higher standard, 
till they have found how to apply that ideal of perfect manhood 
which St. Paul calls c the stature of the fulness of Christ.' 

The traditional and orthodox interpretation of the chapters 
before us is, that they are a specific prediction of the taking of 
Babylon by the Medes and Persians about two hundred years 
after the words were uttered by Isaiah; and it is confidently added 
that the historical events are anticipated with such accuracy of 
detail as can only be explained by miracle. The rationalists admit 
the fact of these precise historical details, but maintain that they 
prove not a miracle, but that the real date of the prophecy is 
contemporary with the events. Whereas the thoughtful reader, 
who examines the text as it is in itself, and not through the 
medium of traditions and conjectures, will, I am bold to say, 
find no such specific predictions and historical details. 

There is just the same profound insight into political princi- 



COMMENTS CONFOUNDED WITH THE TEXT. 



147 



pies, the same acquaintance with the general political relations 
of the foreign nations, and the same foresight of their conse- 
quences, which Isaiah exhibits in the prophecies admitted to be 
his ; and there is the same absence of literal detail, or the same 
evidence that the detail is not historical but ideal, from its not 
corresponding precisely with actual events. The proofs of miracu- 
lous prediction exist only in the mind of the commentators, who 
have endeavoured to confirm the great truth that Isaiah is a 
prophet, and filled with that ( spirit of wisdom and under- 
standing ' which he prized as being the ( Spirit of the Lord,' 
by trivial fancies of their own, which lower him towards the 
level of the muttering wizards whom he denounced. Grotius, 
indeed, saw better, and connected this, like the rest of Isaiah's 
prophecies, with cotemporary events. And it would be hard to 
understand why the rationalists were not content to do the 
same, if we did not remember that, when they first entered on 
the subject, their conception of the human side of prophecy 
was so limited that they could only explain such passages as 
the vision in the sixth chapter, and the inarch of the Assyrian 
army in the tenth, by supposing them to be the one an apologue, 
and the other an historical statement ; and that, though their 
views have been gradually enlarging, they have still, like other 
commentators, what may be called a professional and uncon- 
scious prejudice in favour of the traditions handed down to 
them. This habit of accepting traditional comments as if 
they were a part of the text, is common with rationalist 
no less than orthodox writers, on every part of the Bible, and 
has, if I mistake not, on this occasion, led to the taking for 
granted, first, the orthodox assumption, and then the rationalist 
explanation of it : though each is contrary to the plain facts of 
the text. If there are obscurities and difficulties, this is only 
what might be expected in a book of such antiquity, and with 
such small remains of cotemporary history to throw light on 
its allusions ; and in the present state of our knowledge, it may 
be necessary to leave some of them unexplained, or to explain 
them conjecturally. But that they need such slashing criticism, 
or that its employment does not involve us in greater difficulties 
than it helps us out of, I am unable to see. If the text is 
corrupt, let it be emended ; but let us see what it is, and what 



148 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



it ought to be, each distinctly, and not blended together in a 
luminous mist of the higher criticism. And let us remember 
that what it ought to be is not to be ascertained by deciding how 
we, here in England, in the nineteenth century, should have 
written it, or in what form it would be most easily intelligible 
to us ; for the probability is rather that such would not have 
been the precise form in which a Hebrew prophet would have 
written between two and three thousand years ago. 

Whatever difficulty appears in verses 1, 2, 3, 4. of chapter 
xiv., has, I think, been solved by anticipation, in accepting 
verses 10, 11, 12. of chapter xi., as the genuine and intelligible 
words of Isaiah : only, that in the passage now before us, the 
captivity from which the people of Israel are to be brought 
back is said to be endured in Babylon, and at the hands of the 
king of Babylon ; whereas, in the times of Isaiah, the head of the 
Assyrian empire was usually called king of Assyria, and lived at 
Nineveh, and Babylon was a dependency, under his viceroy or 
vassal-king. Here, as the student of the question knows, lies 
the real difficulty, to which all the others are but make-weights ; 
unless, indeed, he suspects that the spuriousness of these chap- 
ters is itself desired as a make-weight to that of the latter half 
of the book. To this then let us address ourselves, by ex- 
amining the text as it is, and not as it ought to be. 

The prophecy, as it is, then, consists of chap. xiii. and the first 
twenty- seven verses of chap, xiv., its termination being marked 
by the title of the next prophecy, as its commencement is by its 
own title, which states that it is by Isaiah the son of Amos; while 
its position in the book indicates its date to be towards the end 
of the reign of Ahaz. In the last words (verse 25.) of the pro- 
phecy, the impending destruction of the great Assyrian power 
is foretold in language corresponding with that in which Isaiah 
had constantly on previous occasions denounced the same heathen 
oppressor ; while the rest of the denunciation, though perfectly 
congruous with this its own close, differs from those previous 
prophecies in calling the oppressor 6 king of Babylon,' and fore- 
telling the overthrow of that his capital, whereas, they call 
him f king of Assyria,' and speak only of his army being de- 
stroyed. Isaiah's authority for a cotemporary historical fact, is 
as good as that of any other record of his times, If the 



HEBREW HISTORICAL NOTICES OF BABYLON. 149 



latter contradict and disprove a statement purporting to be 
from him, we must balance the evidence and decide accordingly : 
but the mere absence of confirmatory statements would not 
throw doubt on the genuineness of an allusion by Isaiah to a 
fact, probable in itself, and uncontradicted, even though our 
resources for confirmation or contradiction were not so frag- 
mentary as they are. And, therefore, in the absence of con- 
tradiction, sound criticism will decide, that if Isaiah in one 
place calls the oppressor of Israel ' king of Assyria,' and in 
another e king of Babylon,' it was because he either called 
himself by both these titles, or at least was significantly pointed 
out to the prophet's own countrymen by the latter name ; and 
that if Isaiah sometimes describes the Jews as carried captives 
into various lands, and sometimes as living in slavery at 
Babylon, it was because a large proportion of the captives 
taken in the time of Ahaz or of Hezekiah, had fallen into the 
hands of the luxurious and cruel inhabitants of that city. The 
only known fact in opposition to those necessarily involved in 
these expressions of Isaiah is> that Nineveh was the capital of 
Tiglath-Pileser and his successors : but there is no absolute con- 
tradiction or incompatibility between the two ; it would be 
more correct to say that we have two statements which stand 
apart from each other, and in apparent opposition, and to which 
our meagre and fragmentary historical records supply no third 
statement which might reconcile the others, in the way in 
which a third statement so often does in all histories. Probable 
and approximate evidence, indeed, we have. Micah, the contem- 
porary of Isaiah, makes Babylon, and not Nineveh, the city to 
which the daughter of Zion shall be led captive.* Babylon 
was one of the cities from which inhabitants were supplied to 
the cities of Israel, and to which therefore the Israelites were 
deported, in the sixth year of Hezekiah.f Babylon, though at 
this time inferior to Nineveh, inasmuch as the latter was the 
seat of the government, seems to have been the right arm of 
the Assyrian king, its palaces inhabited by his chief princes, and 
its vast population recruiting his armies, and consequently shar- 

* Micah, iv. 10., which Gesenius refers to in his chronological table as 
proof that the Assyrian kings sent their prisoners to Babylon at this time, 
f 2 Kings, xvii. 23, 24. 

l 3 



150 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ing largely in the treasures and the captives of the countries 
they helped to conquer. It had apparently an importance some- 
thing like that of Delhi during the reigns of those Mogul em- 
perors who lived at Agra, or of Edinburgh and Dublin in our 
own time * ; and it was, in truth, as its earlier and later history 
shows, the more permanent of the two centres of the great 
Mesopotamian empires. The traditions of its origin, of the 
nations that had sprung from it, and of the meaning of its name, 
gave it a special importance in the eyes of Isaiah and the people 
he addressed, as the type and embodiment of worldly arbitrary 
power, in contrast with the spiritual and law-governed kingdom 
of the Lord : and, therefore, he might well name it (in a fashion of 
which we shall have other instances) f , instead of Nineveh, which 
he never mentions, and of which his non-mention, when he de- 
nounces so many other cities, would be a great puzzle, but for 
this explanation of it; for he must have known that the great 
king of Assyria had a city as well as an army. To use an illus- 
tration now become familiar to us, f Babylon ' is a monogram or 
ideograph, employed by Isaiah to represent the capital of the 
Assyrian empire. And so the Euphrates, not the Tigris, is the 
river which is to overflow the land of Immanuel :f: it was to 
Babylon, not to Nineveh, that Isaiah warned Hezekiah that his 
sons and wealth would be carried ; Babylon, not Nineveh, sup- 
plies the forces which besiege Tyre § ; and to those who are 
content to take the text as it is, I may further quote the de- 
nunciations of Babylon, in chapter xxi., and the latter half of 
the book. So adduced, they are facts supporting the fact before 
us : in the other mode of employing them, they are parts of 
an argument in a circle, in which the hypothesis as to the 

* Compare, too, the following : — " The preponderance of the Persians 
was at last complete ; though the Medes always continued to be the second 
nation in the empire, after the Persians, properly so called; and by early- 
Greek writers the great enemy in the East is often called ' the Mede,' as 
well as ' the Persian.' Ekbatana always continued to be one of the capital 
cities, and the usual summer residence of the kings of Persia ; Susa on the 
Choaspes, on the Kissian plain farther southward, and east of the Tigris, 
being their winter abode." — Grote's History of Greece, iv. 251. " Me- 
dising, i. e. embracing the cause of the Persians." — Ibid. v. 77. 

f Chapters xxv. 10, and xxxiv. 5, 6, where see farther. 

\ Isaiah, vii. 20. viii. 7, 8. § Isaiah, xxiii. 13. 



ASSYRIAN NOTICES OF BABYLON. 



151 



meaning or origin of those chapters sustains the like hypothesis 
as to this one ; and the former in its turn does the like service 
for the latter. 

And though the decipherment of the Assyrian annals them- 
selves is still in its infancy, and it would therefore be rash to 
draw final conclusions from them, yet the (partly independent) 
versions or summaries, of Colonel Rawlinson and Dr. Hincks, do 
present so many statements in corroboration of this which I call 
Isaiah's own account (and this without any suspicion on the part 
of these learned men that they were supplying such corrobo- 
ration, and therefore with the probable omission of details which 
might be of much importance for our purpose) that it is 
difficult to conceive that the correspondences are illusory, 
and not historical. They are to this effect : — The king who 
built the north-west palace at Nimroud records that, on taking 
a city which ( is particularly described as one of considerable 
importance,' he imprisoned its king ' in Babylon.' Sargon styles 
himself ( the great king, the king of Assyria, and the lord pa- 
ramount (or the high-priest) of Babylon,' as kings both before 
and after him seem to have done : yet he did not take this 
addition till the twelfth year of his reign, when he turned up- 
side down the pavement slabs of his palace, and inscribed the 
name of Babylon among his own titles, and that of the Baby- 
lonian Nebo in a conspicuous place in the series of gods to 
whom the palace was newly dedicated, both having been pre- 
viously wanting. And at this date his annals say that he 
conquered and expelled Merodach-Baladan, who had been twelve 
years de facto king of Babylon, where Sargon thenceforth reigned 
in his own or his son's name, till near his death. Sargon's 
most important campaigns ( were against Susiana and Ely- 
mais, and against Babylonia and Chaldsea, which countries 
were evidently very closely connected ; ' and in his last year 
he mentions that he carried off the gold, silver, and valuable 
property of the seven kings in Yetnan (which Rawlinson sup- 
poses to be the region between Egypt and Phoenicia) to Baby- 
lon, because they refused to pay their accustomed tribute. On, 
or just before, the death of Sargon, Merodach-Baladan, with 
the help of allies from Susiana or Elam, recovered Baby- 
lon ; but was speedily driven out again by Sennacherib, who 

L 4 



152 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



plundered Babylon, as well as all c the fortresses of the Chal- 
daeans,' carrying away gold, silver, and precious stones, gods, 
men, and women, chariots, horses, camels, and mules, • altogether 
a vast booty.' Sennacherib then appointed a viceroy (his bro- 
ther according to Berosus), at Babylon : he had to reconquer 
it a second time from Merodach-Baladan, in his fourth year 5 
when he appointed his son Assur-Nadin ( Asordanius in Berosus) 
as his viceroy.* Berosus relates a conquest of Babylon by the 
Medes, and a subsequent dynasty of Chaldsean kings, long before 
these times : he also calls Pul and Merodach-Baladan, Chal- 
dseans f : and the constant appearance of the ( Chaldaeans' in all 
the Cuneiform inscriptions will, I presume, end the doubts (the 
nature of which I do not understand) as to the historical exist- 
ence of this race in the days of Isaiah, and will allow us to 
adopt the simple and straightforward conclusions on the sub- 
ject, of Gesenius on chapter xxiii. 13. And we shall then 
be able to say in elucidation of the mention of the Chal- 
dees in the prophecy before us, that if, at no distant period 
— shortly followed, or perhaps marked, by the commence- 
ment of the era of Nabonassar, b. c. 747 — the Chaldean 
mountaineers had been transplanted from Armenia into Baby- 
lon, where they would adopt its civilisation and share its 
wealth, while they supplied new vigour and military import- 
ance to the old city, that city might, without impropriety, have 
been called e the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency,' by Isaiah, 
though we doubt bow far he was conscious that his impassioned 
words would be still more applicable to a great Chaldaean 
dynasty afterwards to arise at Babylon, than to the events he 
saw or anticipated in his own day. 

So too of the fulfilment of the prophecy : — Grotius said, 
that if the Assyrian annals of Abydenus, and the Baby- 
lonian of Berosus were extant, we should find that between 

* Hincks, in Transactions of the Irish Academy, xxii. pt. 2., p. 40 : pt. 4. ? 
p. 364. ff. :, and in Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 140. 353. 620. Raw- 
linson's Outline, pp. 19. 25, 26.; Rawlinson's Commentary (1850), p. 67 
A comparison of the places quoted will show that I have merely put the 
translators' own last conclusions into juxta-position with their earlier ones, 
without mixing any theory of my own. 

f Bunsen's Vet. Script. Fragmenta, appended to Aegyptens Stelle, iii. 



BABYLON SACKED IN ISAIAH'S TIME. 153 

the times of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar, the woes here 
denounced against Babylon did in effect come to pass, through 
some invasion or invasions of the Medes, who about this 
date became independent of Assyria, and very powerful, under 
Deioces and his successor. And now the originals of those annals 
tell us, that Merodach-Baladan wrested Babylon, once at least, 
from each of the kings Sargon and Sennacherib ; and that in both 
instances he did it by help of an army from Elam (or Susa), 
which nation is joined by Isaiah, in chapter xxi., with the Mede, 
as the destined conquerors of Babylon, while Media appears in 
juxta-position with Elam among the conquests of both Sargon and 
Sennacherib, the latter going to invade the Medes immediately 
after his second defeat of Merodach-Baladan, and indicating 
their power by the notice that none of his ancestors had received 
tribute from them as he had done.* Let us put these things 
together, and remember what a great and rich city Babylon 
was, and in what fashion it would be sacked by Merodach- 
Baladan, and his c Susianian allies : ' let us consider that a great 
part of the same inhabitants who suffered on these occasions 
because they were the subjects of the great king, would be 
treated but little better when he found them with their allesri- 
ance transferred to his rival : and then we shall be able to judge 
what farther information we require, in order to decide whether 
it is impossible that Isaiah could have written the words before 
us. If Colonel Bawlinson's belief that Sargon was a usurper, 
who expelled the dynasty of Tiglath-Pileser by a military re- 
volution, should be substantiated when the evidence is complete, 
this would have been of itself a striking fulfilment of Isaiah's 
denunciations, whether the literal Babylon or only the empire 
which it symbolised to the Jew, were subverted on the occasion : 
the position of the prophecy in the book would indicate its date 
to be in Tiglath-Pileser's reign. In any case, we need not 
limit ourselves so much as Grrotius does: it is not necessary 
to assume that this prophecy was fulfilled more literally and 
definitely than many others of which we have the historical 
counterpart, and see that they were far from having such a 
literal fulfilment. It is improbable that Babylon was utterly 

* Rawlinson's Outline, pp. 18, 19, 20. 25. ; and Commentary, p. 61.: Hincks, 
in Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 140. 142. 145. 



154 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



destroyed between Sennacherib's overthrow and the restora- 
tion of the empire by his son Esarhaddon; but it is a fact 
that it was not so destroyed by Cyrus, but perished by a 
decay extending through centuries. In order to enter into 
the spirit of Hebrew prophecy, and understand its meaning, 
we must consider that the prophet is enunciating universal 
propositions, but that instead of employing generalisations 
and abstractions, as we moderns would do, he takes Baby- 
lon, or Moab, or Edom, or Israel, in the concrete, and uses this 
concrete image as the diagram by which to illustrate his propo- 
sition. The diagram is sometimes more, sometimes less, accu- 
rately drawn, according to the knowledge or skill of the 
individual prophet ; but he who looks for the meaning and 
truth of the prophecy in the literal correspondence of some 
historical event, falls into the same kind of error as the school- 
boy who tries to prove a proposition of Euclid by measuring the 
parts of the diagram, and cannot apprehend how the proposition 
itself is equally true, and equally important, whether the 
circles and lines are drawn with ruler and compasses, or by the 
most awkward hand. 

Isaiah looked on the main fortress of that kingdom of 
Force, which it was the mission of his life to denounce, as 
the really impotent rival of the kingdom of Righteousness, 
though the instrument for punishing the nations, and especially 
the Lord's chosen nation, for their rebellions against His 
laws. He knew that numbers of his countrymen (of Israel 
and of Judah) were at that moment the slaves of the cruel 
and luxurious Babylonians, and he may have anticipated that 
still more of the like punishment would be inflicted on those 
who yet remained in their own land. But he was appointed to 
preach not only judgment, but pardon and release, to his people: 
and while he meditated upon the events of his times, and of the 
times before him, and studied them in the light of that vision 
which had revealed to him the Lord of hosts, and the reality 
of His dominion, he saw, — not by miracle, but by that insight 
into the principles governing the rise and fall of empires, which 
was a higher and more spiritual gift of God to him than any such 
miraculous power could have been, — that the Assyrian dominion 
would be overthrown by the less degenerate and more warlike 



ARGUMENTS FEOM STYLE AND DICTION. 



155 



nations from the north, who neither cared for gold, nor spared 
children, and whom, with his wonted concreteness of style, he here 
specifies as the Medes, and in chapter xxi. as the Medes and Per- 
sians: he saw that this Babylon, with all it symbolised, would be 
utterly destroyed, and the Jewish nation completely freed from 
its bondage. He saw all this in its idea, and accordingly set it 
forth in all the greatness and absoluteness of the idea ; while he 
believed that he himself should see such an accomplishment of 
it as was suited to his own times, that the successor of Ahaz 
would reign in righteousness over a people delivered from the 
thraldom of Assyria and Babylon, and that Babylon would 
meanwhile be humbled to the dust. But only a small part this 
idea could be possibly embodied in any single set of historical 
facts. Only in the course of ages could the whole idea be 
evolved : there was much more of it brought out in the days of 
Cyrus than in the time of Hezekiah ; but still the discovery was 
but partial, and the accomplishment had — nay has — still to go 
on. It is not necessary for me to add to the above notices of the 
Assyrian annals, an abstract and reconciliation of what remains 
to us of the history of Assyria and Babylon. In Vitringa, 
Prideaux, Gesenius, Winer, and Kitto, or in their original autho- 
rities, the student must necessarily examine the subject at large, 
and for himself : my ambition is only to help him to remove 
some obstacles which, if I mistake not, stand in his way. And 
I would ask him to judge for himself, and without waiting 
for leave from any commentators, whether, taking the text as it 
is, and interpreting its historical allusions by the ordinary me- 
thods and rules of criticism, and availing himself of such in- 
formation as the remaining historical records supply, the state 
of things, internal and external — ideas and facts — supposed in 
the present prophecy is, or is not, something to the effect above 
stated. 

As to the arguments against the genuineness of these chap- 
ters, which are drawn from their style and diction, I would 
observe that it does not require a knowledge of Hebrew to 
enable the reader to put the case, and to judge what would be 
the possible results; just as a lawyer can form a reasonable con- 
clusion in an ecclesiastical or commercial inquiry, though he is 
neither a clergyman nor a merchant. It will stand thus : — 



156 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



We have before us the small remains of the literature of a 
nation whose habits of thought, and therefore of writing, are 
removed from ours by the distance of 2500 years, and of Asia 
from Europe, and of all the differences therein implied ; the lan- 
guage in which this literature was produced, and in which it still 
exists, became a dead language about 2300 years ago : and the 
books themselves have been preserved in their present form, and 
with the usual discrepancies of ancient manuscripts, through times 
in which the nation had so little life that it lost all its original 
histories, and appears to have saved the books it has, because 
they were habitually used in religious worship, and therefore 
must have been at the same time liable to such modernisations 
as books in popular use do not escape, even in our days of 
printing. And the question is whether, with the very limited 
means of comparison which such, and such small, remains of the 
literature afford, it is possible for certain very learned Hebraists 
to pronounce that the short prophecy before us was written not 
2500, but 2300 years ago ; because, as they assert — while other 
eminent, if not equal, scholars deny — they find five or six 
words * or phrases belonging to the later period, and the style 
more flowing than that of the prophecies which they (with 
much disagreement among themselves on this point, however,) 
admit to be those of Isaiah ? Could any of us, at the interval 
of little more than 200 years, decide such a question on such 
grounds, even as to a passage in the works of our own country- 
man, Shakspeare? Should we not think a f By W. S.' in an 
old title-page, of far more help than all our higher criticism ? 
If we had nothing but a priori reasoning to guide us as to the 
genuineness of these chapters of Isaiah, we should have to say 

* Gesenius specifies Jive, besides some grammatical usages ; and Hitzig 
four others, adopting only one of those of Gesenius, from which I conclude 
that he gives the rest up. Some of his own are plainly of no weight : and 
there is ample counter-criticism, of which the reader will find accounts in 
Dr. Alexander's work. Let me mention too, the authority of Vitringa, who, 
without suspecting that a doubt on the subject would ever be raised, says 
that he can recognise the style of his author in every line of his writings. 
He may be credulous, but credulity is in itself no more superficial and in- 
accurate than scepticism ; and Vitringa's deep religious spirit gives him a 
sympathy with the prophet, and a consequent power of judging on the point 
in question (that of Isaiah's genuine style) , which the sceptical critics cannot 
pretend to. 



SUSPENSE BETTER THAN HASTY DECISION. 



157 



with a great authority on a like subject: ' The lesson must be 
learnt, hard and painful though it be, that no imaginable reach 
of critical acumen will, of itself, enable us to discriminate fancy 
from reality, in the absence of a tolerable stock of evidence:'* 
butlsaiah's historical reality is not lost like Homer's, in the mist 
of ages ; he stands as completely within the historical period as 
Demosthenes or Cicero ; his name is on all the old, genuine, 
title-pages, and only omitted in the modern, spurious, ones ; 
and criticism has merely to decide the negative point, whether 
it is impossible that these passages in a book thus his- 
torically ascribed to Isaiah, can have been written by him. On 
the other hand, let me direct the reader's attention to the 
various passages in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, in which 
the resemblances are such as can only arise from one having 
quoted or imitated the other; and ask him to consider whe- 
ther the relation of original and copyist, which exists in the 
case of the prophecies in which it is admitted that Jeremiah 
holds the latter place, does appear to be reversed in the case of 
those in which, on the neological theory, he is assumed to be the 
original. For while I believe that no positive conclusion from 
such exercises of the c higher criticism ' are to be set against 
the external evidence of existing texts, it seems to me not un- 
fair to ask what is the negative result of such an inquiry : 
namely, whether Jeremiah's prophecy against Moab has the ap- 
pearance of a mere composition of thoughts and images, without 
the complete unity of the other prophecy, which is admitted to 
be the older, even by those who deny it to be by Isaiah ; and 
whether, on the contrary, Jeremiah's denunciation of Babylon f 
indicates the unity of an original work, while the various pro- 
phecies attributed to Isaiah on the same subject show signs of 
being derived from that source. 

* Mr. Grote, on the Unity of the Iliad and Odyssey — History of Greece, 
ii. p. 171. And farther on (p. 217.), he says, " The point" [Homeric unity] 
" is thus still under controversy among able scholars, and is probably destined 
to remain so : for, in truth, our means of knowledge are so limited, that no 
man can produce arguments sufficiently cogent to contend against op- 
posing preconceptions ; and it creates a painful sentiment of diffidence, when 
we read the expressions of equal and absolute persuasion with which the 
two opposite conclusions have both been advanced." 

f Chapters 1. li. Ewald's hypothetical date and authorship of these chap- 
ters is, of course, a reply to my argument so far. 



158 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



But while I ask the reader to weigh these arguments against 
the conclusion that Isaiah could not have written these chapters, 
and that the text must be emended as corrupt, I would advise 
him not to be too impatient to have the question settled in the 
present stage of our knowledge and critical skill : nor when he 
has once acquainted himself with the doubts raised on the sub- 
ject, to hope forthwith for 'the sweet sleep that he had yesterday.' 
He may, indeed, be sure that he will one day find that true 
wisdom and understanding, in this as in all things, will keep their 
promise, and be 6 life to his soul,' so that his * foot shall not 
stumble,' and his c sleep shall be sweet : ' but the passage from 
child-like credence to manly insight is ever hard, and requires 
patience. I believe that he who, in his natural desire for cer- 
tainty, overpersuades himself that the arguments of a Hengsten- 
berg or other evangelical commentators are conclusive, will 
presently find a reaction in his mind, which will make him 
more at a loss than before. He must, after he has heard the 
debate on both sides, retire to quiet and long meditation on 
it before he can hope to get at any permanent result ; and he 
may be content meanwhile, if he can honestly believe that the 
genuineness of the prophecy has not been disproved, though 
brought into doubt. Let him take Chaucer's advice: — 

s Fly from the press, and dwell with sothfastness [truth] : — 
The wrestling of the world asketh a fall : — 
But truth thee shall deliver, 'tis no drede.' 

The Assyrian Inscriptions will ere long take their settled place 
among historical documents : and we are making daily progress 
in the scientific investigation of what Hebrew prophecy actually 
was, by the repeated examination of the subject in all direc- 
tions, and by many workmen : and the answer to this question 
will finally become clear. 

Let us now return to the text of this first of the series of 
c Burdens,' — weighty and sustained denunciations against the 
various nations. 

In the mountains to the north of Babylon is heard the hum 
of a great multitude, which proves to be the northern nations 
gathering to battle, mustered by the Lord of hosts Himself, 
and the weapons of His indignation, for laying waste the whole 



ISAI. XIII. 1. — XIV. 12. : FATES OF BABYLON AND ISRAEL. 159 



land. In Babylon terror seizes every heart, every face is flushed 
or pallid with alarm and amazement : the day of the Lord's 
judgment is come upon the world-wide empire, like a tempest 
which shakes the heavens and earth, and, while it lasts, brings 
the established order of nature to chaos. In that populous and 
wealthy abode of luxurious and selfish civilisation, the life of a 
man, his own, or that of the soldier whom at any price he 
would employ, shall become more precious than gold, because 
gold can no longer buy it: the Medes care not for gold*, but 
for blood, though it be the blood of boys and infants : and if 
they want gold, they need not take it as ransom, for it is already 
theirs as plunder : for Babylon is defenceless, all her foreign 
auxiliaries are fled, or if any where they have made a stand 
against the enemy, they have been put to the sword. The deso- 
lation shall be complete. The Lord had once declared of his 
own vineyard that He would break down its wall, and lay it 
waste, and that strange sheep should feed there ; but Babylon 
shall not be even a pasture-ground ; the Arab wandering through 
Mesopotamia (as he has done ever since), and seeking pasture for 
his flocks and plunder for himself, shall not stay nor let them 
stay here, but shall leave the palaces and the pavilions to the 
owls and the wolves who make them resound with their cries. f 
It is said that at this very day the Bedouin, or wandering Arab, 
has a superstitious fear of passing a single night on the site of 
Babylon, and that the natives of the country believe it to be 
inhabited by demons in the form of goats. There seems, in- 
deed, to have been an ancient belief among the Jews them- 
selves that demons took the form of goats — appeared as satyrs 
in fact : and there is much to be said for either our Authorised 
Version, or for the more literary rendering of c shaggy beasts,' 
or still more simply ( goats.' 

Out of the destruction of Babylon shall come the deliverance 
of Israel : the whole captive people shall be called, as by a new 
election and choice of the Lord, and restored to their own 

* " Ye Medes and others who now hear me, I well know that you have 
not accompanied me in this expedition with a view of acquiring wealth." — 
Speech of Cyrus to his Army, Xenoph. Cyrop. v. 

f " And in their palaces, 

Where luxury late reign' d, sea-monsters whelp'd, 

And stabled." Paradise Lost, ix. 750. 



160 



HEBEEW POLITICS. 



land, from their hard bondage ; and they shall bring their former 
masters back with them, to be in turn their servants. The 
prophet then puts into the mouth of the restored nation a song 
of which Lowth is generally thought not to speak with ex- 
aggeration, when he calls it the finest of its kind extant in any 
language ; and as to which, those who profess to be able to dis- 
tinguish the styles of different ages of Hebrew literature should 
explain, upon what known principles the strongly marked and 
gradual decline of literary power and taste between the times 
of Isaiah and Ezra could have exhibited such a revival as this 
ode shows. It is a song of triumph in the form of a dirge, 
and therefore involves an under-current of sarcasm or irony. 
The oppressor, and his golden city — so called for its wealth, 
or for its exaction of tribute — are fallen, and the whole earth, 
even to the very fir trees, is at rest, and breaks into singing: — 

' All the earth is gay : 
Land and sea 

Give themselves up to jollity.'* 

Hell — the unseen world of gloom to which the grave is the 
gate — is stirred to receive the new-comer : the shadowy and 
giant forms of once famous kings rise from their thrones below, 
to meet their brother, now become weak as they. Israel then 
resumes the speech (at verse 11.), and contrasts the ambition of 
him who would have ascended into heaven, and to the heights 
of the heavenly hill, with his actual fate, brought down to hell, 
and to the depths of its pit. The word which our version in 
both cases translates f sides,' may be better rendered ( uttermost 
heights ' or ( depths,' the Hebrew having the double force. 
The old explanation of ( the mount of the congregation, in the 
sides of the north,' was, that it referred to Mount Sion and the 
Temple, and that the cloud (the original is in the singular) 
was the white cloud of Grod's presence ; the impious boast being 
thus analogous to that in chapter x. 11., * Shall I not, as I 
have done to Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and 
her images?' And I see no anti-climax in such a reading; 

* " Ipsi lsetitia voces ad sidera jactant 

Intonsi montes; ipsse jam carmina rupes, 

Ipsa sonant arbusta." Virg. Eel. v. 62. 



IS. XIV. 13—27.: OVERTHROW OF THE EMPIRE OF FORCE. 161 

nor that there is any impropriety in the blending of the 
heathenish and the Jewish belief on the subject into one image. 
The modern interpretation, that the reference is to the assembly 
of the gods in some Meru-mountain, in the northern, and there- 
fore highest, realms of an eastern mythology, is founded on the 
supposition that the local traditions which place Sion on the south 
of J erusalem, must be preferred to those of the Talmud, which 
declare it to have been on the north : — as to which question, see 
below, on Isaiah xxii. One poetical image suggests, or thrusts 
out, another, in rapid succession. The king of Babylon shall 
not share what just now seemed the low condition of the other 
monarchs but now presents itself as a glorious repose, when con- 
trasted with his lot — fallen by the sword, his body not em- 
balmed, but the food of worms, refused a royal sepulchre, and 
fortunate if he can get so much burial as to be thrown into a 
pit with the common slain. The general meaning of verse 19. 
is plain, but the exact sense of the details is questioned. Per- 
haps the most probable explanation of the strong phrase c abo- 
minable branch' is, that c branch' is used here as elsewhere in a 
genealogical sense, and that the words are a vehement antici- 
pation of the thought below, e the seed of evildoers shall not 
be named for ever ; ' where the word ( named ' or ( renowned ' 
is the same as in the passage, ( in Isaac shall thy name be called, 
and as in Kuth, iv. 14., which latter compare with its context. 
The Lord himself will take care to cut off the ( name and the 
remnant,' the direct heir and the collateral remainder-man, and 
the city, like its royal family, shall be exterminated. The ap- 
propriateness of the image of pools of water is evident, when 
we remember that Babylon lay in a low situation, where the 
land was only kept from the periodical inundations of the 
Euphrates by constant attention to the canals and ditches. If 
it were deserted by its inhabitants, it would inevitably become 
6 pools of water' in a short time: — as is now the case. The 
expression, c besom of destruction,' finds a counterpart in the 
annals of Sargon, where he calls himself ' the sweeper away of 
Samaria, and of the whole of Beth-Omri.' 

But the invasion of Judsea, not the subsequent deportation 
of its inhabitants (like that which had already begun in the 
northern tribes of the kingdom of Samaria), might seem the 

M 



162 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



more pressing danger to Isaiah's own countrymen at the time he 
wrote ; therefore he winds up this far-seeing denunciation of 
the ultimate fates of Babylon and Israel, with a declaration of 
the Lord's purpose, — confirmed with an oath, and not to be 
disannulled, — to break the power of the Assyrians when they 
had entered His land, on the confines of which they were now 
hovering, and to free His people from the yoke of tribute and 
oppression, which they were already feeling the weight of. 



THE PHILISTINES. 



163 



CHAPTER X. 

ISAIAH XIV. 28,: PHILISTIA. ORIGIN OF THE PHILISTINES — — THEIR EX- 
TERMINATION COMMANDED BY MOSES. LAW OF CONQUESTS AND EXTER- 
MINATIONS. BRITISH CONQUEST OF INDIA. EVIL NOT ETERNAL,— 

PHILISTIA's RELATIONS WITH JUDAH WITH ASSYRIA. — - S ARGON AND 

SENNACHERIB IN PHILISTIA. 

* In the year that king Ahaz died was this burden : ' — namely, 
on Philistia. There is a turn of expression in this title, which 
is noticeable, both as being such as an author himself would 
be likely to give, when arranging and editing his writings in a 
collected form ; and also such as a patriot would use to vent 
his feeling at the thought of the relief from national shame and 
suffering which the change from an Ahaz to a Hezekiah had 
effected. Like the opening of chapter vi., it is better referred to 
the time before, than after, the king's death, as the context 
shows. 

Philistia was the south-west coast of the land of Canaan, to 
the whole of which it afterwards gave its name in the Greek 
form of Palestine, and was nominally included in the tribe of 
Judah. It was originally inhabited by the Avites, who were 
expelled by the Caphtorim, a race of Egyptian origin, but 
supposed to have come immediately from Crete or Cyprus, and 
who, under the name of Philistines, continued as a distinct, and 
for the most part independent, nation, in spite of the efforts of 
Israel to subdue them. These Caphtorim are also called 
Cherethim, which latter would be the Hebrew mode of writing 
Cretans, and which is twice translated Kprjrss by the LXX.; 
whence it has been inferred that there is ground for a tradition 
which says that the Cretans took possession of this coast under 
Minos, who built Gaza, and called it Minoa. Caphtor will 
then be Crete. We may infer from Amos, ix. 7. and Deut. ii. 
23. (in which latter verse translate Hazerim 6 villages,' in- 
stead of leaving it a proper name), that this immigration of the 

m 2 



164 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



Caphtorim must have taken place within the historical memory 
of the Jews, though at such a period that Abraham found 
them already settled, as Philistines. The supposition of Vi- 
tringa that the the ' Cherethites and Pelethites,' were Cretan 
and Philistine bowmen, the body-guards of David, has been 
adopted by two of the most recent authorities on this subject : 
and it derives increased probability from David's long sojourn 
in Philistia, and the attachment which Ittai the Gittite (of 
Gath) showed to his fortunes.* 

The Philistines were among the nations whom Moses com- 
manded the children of Israel to exterminate. This command 
can be better appreciated with our now reviving belief that 
there is a morality and a criminal justice for nations as well as 
for individuals ; but it would perhaps never have been so com- 
monly impugned as it has been, but for the no less common 
and far less moral defence, that the act commanded would have 
been mere wickedness in any other people, but that being com- 
manded by God It was thus made lawful for the Jews. But 
as to the command itself, apart from such defences of it, I 
say that it was both righteous and merciful, and that it is not 
an exception to the universal law by which men are to go- 
vern themselves, but the announcement — the revelation — once 
for all of the law which always has been, and always will be, 
applicable to all like cases, — whether a return of the Heracleids, 
a Spanish conquest of Mexico, a Saxon or a Norman inva- 
sion of England, or a Sir James Brooke's destruction of Borneo 
pirates. If the spread of civilisation, knowledge, justice, vir- 
tue, religion, and whatever else distinguishes men from beasts, 
is a good and not an evil, then it is good for men to use all the 
means which are really necessary to effect that end, even though 
some of them be never so rough and unpleasing ; and it is not 
less base in public than in private morals, to shrink from the 
responsibility of ourselves doing that which we know it is good 
to have done. If a weak, effeminate, degenerate nation can be 
improved by subjection to a stronger, manlier, more virtuous 

* 2 Sam. viii. 18., xv. 18-22., xx.7.; 1 Kings, i. 38. 44. The last edition 
of Winer's Realwcerterbuch contains much valuable matter under the seve- 
ral names above. 



NATIONAL EXTEEMINATIQNS : WHEN LAWFUL. 165 

nation, then it is not only the right, but the duty, of the latter 
to bring it into subjection, whenever the indications of God's 
providence, be they of peace or war, show that the time has 
come. And if the nation is not merely degenerate, but hope- 
lessly corrupt, then it is not only the right, but the duty, of 
some worthier nation to destroy it, and rid the world of its 
abominations. The Gospel has given to us, in modern Chris- 
tendom, means of reclaiming nations who would have been irre- 
claimable by any measures which Greeks or Romans, or even 
Jews, could apply ; and we are bound to act with corresponding 
gentleness and forbearance. But if we look at the actual con- 
dition and relations of the Israelites and the nations of Canaan 
in the time of Moses, we see that the Canaanites had reached 
the last stage of degeneracy when they made their very re- 
ligion to consist in the practice of their characteristic crimes of 
unnatural cruelty or lust, and that wherever they were tolerated 
instead of exterminated by the Israelites, the purer morals as 
well as faith of the Israelites soon fell under the pestilent con- 
tagion, and they not only followed their gods, but ( did after 
their abominations :' so that the event proved what Moses fore- 
saw, that if the future nation of Israel was to fill that place in 
the world and the world's history which its ff its right noble 
stock,' its stirps generosa ethistorica, already indicated it to be in- 
tended to fill, room must be made for it not merely in territory but 
in moral atmosphere, by a national execution such as we Christians 
still inflict on individual criminals of like magnitude. If Moses 
had counted the slow moral death of Israel a less evil than the 
physical extinction of races who had already destroyed their 
own human being, what would have been the condition of the 
world now, and what the state of the world-wide contest be- 
tween good and evil? If we examine the whole case in that 
impartial and thoughtful temper which alone becomes the 
student of history, we must, I think, come to the conclusion 
that these injunctions of Moses are really righteous; and 
worthy — if the creation of man at all was worthy — of the God 
of righteousness : and that their provisions for confining the 
destruction of life within the narrowest limits possible *, are in 



* Deut. xx. 10—18. 
m 3 



166 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



accordance with the recognised rules of warfare in the humanest 
ancient nations, and with much of the practice of even those 
of Christian Europe. In a word, I believe that if we can read 
them in the light of universal history, and history in their light, 
we shall see them to be what they claim to be, — a part of the 
revelation of God. 

Here, as always, the Bible reveals to us the universal law of 
political society, in the special instance of the Hebrew nation. 
The claim of Abraham's descendants to the land of Canaan, be- 
cause God had given it to him, is a claim essentially of the same 
kind as that of the Dorians to Sparta, or of the Normans to 
England. There was no more technical force in the first than 
in the others : they no less than it were divinely inspired and 
sanctioned : but the Hebrew grant and conquest, taken in con- 
nection with the whole previous and subsequent history of which 
they are a part, reveal God as the righteous Author and Up- 
holder of political society, anticipating, preparing, and directing 
all the successive arrangements by which the end is to be ef- 
fected ; and thus they throw a direct light (for him who cares 
to have it) on all other national conquests and settlements, 
which these only reflect back on it. The Jews were, no 
doubt, as bloody and rapacious in their manner of effecting 
their settlement in Palestine, as many other nations in like cir- 
cumstances ; but this does but make it clearer, that we have to 
distinguish between the thing that had to be done because it 
was right and good to do it, and the imperfect human instru- 
ments who did it in a very imperfect manner. As soon as we 
once get this distinction between the eternal, wise, and good 
law of national settlements, and the partial and defective realisa- 
tions of it in time by men, we recover the old faith in the Bible 
as the revelation of God's mind ; and yet are freer than the 
freest sceptic from the strange, yet common, perversion of 
reverence into superstition which has made men, in the last and 
present generation, fall back on that (in truth, though not in 
intention) immoral and blasphemous defence of the Hebrew con- 
quest, which pleads that it ' is but a wrong in God's own world, 
and He may quickly make it right.' This doctrine has made 
many a man reject the Bible, when he has too hastily supposed 
that it did to contain what he had been taught from childhood to 
be there, but what his own conscience told him was contrary to 



BRITISH CONQUEST OF INDIA. 



167 



the immutable distinction of right and wrong. And it has de- 
veloped that unhealthy and dishonest way of looking at history 
and politics by religious men, that atheistic separation between 
worldly and religious grounds of political action (as though the 
former, no less than the latter, were good in its place) which 
we are all familiar with. Thus, every real student of the his- 
tory of the establishment of the British power in India knows, 
that our merchants there were originally actuated by no am- 
bitious designs, but by singularly limited desires for mere peace- 
ful traffic; and that they allowed the conquests of Clive in 
Bengal, as well as the earlier wars at Madras, with the greatest 
reluctance, and purely in order to defend themselves in the 
midst of the general anarchy into which the Mogul empire 
was dissolved : and yet religious writers of no small know- 
ledge of history, have actually preferred to ignore the real cur- 
rent of events, and to assert that our possession of India cannot 
be justified on Christian grounds, and is no place for a Christian 
governor, like Sir J ohn Shore ; but that we have of course a 
right, on worldly grounds, to hold and govern what a worldly 
disregard of the principles of the Bible alone enabled us to get. 
Let us take the facts of the conquest as they really occurred ; 
and let us say, that though the English traders had as little be- 
lief that God was calling on them to f go up and possess the 
land,' as they had ambitious inclination to do so ; yet that be- 
cause it was God's will to re-organise India under Christian 
laws and institutions, after those of Menu and of the Koran 
had done their work, He, by His providence, made the first 
steps of the conquest unavoidable, and so led us on to the 
subsequent position, in which an ambitious Hastings or Wel- 
lesley, no less than a justice-loving Cornwallis, or a pious and 
philanthropic Shore, were made to do their successive tasks : — 
and then we shall falsify neither the Bible nor history. 

The barren question of the origin of evil may, of course, be 
raised here as anywhere else, and with as little result. Yet 
the workings of evil in political society, and this harsh remedy 
of the extinction of races, do present difficulties for which every 
reasonable man desires a solution, and of which the one sufficient 
solution is, that the end is not in this world ; that men are but 
at school on earth ; and that our earthly existence will one day 

m4 



168 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



prove to bear some such relation to our higher life, — as trivial 
and transient in its details, though as important in its results — 
as the mature man now sees his school-boy life to have been. 
And, therefore, it may not be out of place to notice here a still 
more important instance of that habit of conceiving God in our 
own image, which I have already spoken of, and to which all 
these notions of a right to do wrong pertain. It was but 
another reflex of the narrow, fine-gentleman, slave-trading, 
eighteenth-century, spirit which exhibited, in the light of 
its logical systems, the doctrine that God's punishments are 
eternal, that is, ends and not means ; and which could believe, 
with complacency, that God had made hell a permanent and 
important part of heaven, and consigned a large portion of the 
human race to it, with the same kind of justice as our legislature 
and judges executed day by day without misgiving — as an end 
and not as a means — upon classes, criminal for the most part 
through an ignorance and misery for which their rulers were re- 
sponsible. Such notions — very different when deliberately 
systematised, to what they are as held by a Luther, who ex- 
claims, ' Nature says it is unjust, Grace says it is unjust, but 
Glory will prove it just,' and there leaves it in reverent hu- 
mility — still hang about us, and we are afraid of rooting 
them up, lest we root up wheat with the tares. But they are 
ready to vanish. The growing faith that reformation, not de- 
struction, is the end in man's dealings with the rebel against 
human law, is but the refracted light which tells that a clearer, 
brighter, more Christian apprehension of God's character is 
about to dawn upon us. And instead of our continuing to 
fancy that we are bound to read the New Testament, by the 
dimmer light of the Old, and to limit the divine inspiration of 
the Apostle of the Gentiles, in his amplest utterances, by the 
letter of a few of his sentences, interpreted (or rather misinter- 
preted) so literally as to be no more logical than moral, we shall 
find ourselves made free by the truth as it is in Christ ; and then 
the Church will no longer pass by, but will give the importance 
and the meaning which St. Paul himself gives, to that ( revela- 
tion of the mystery of the grace of God in Christ, which in 
other ages was not made known unto the sons of men,' and 
which Christians have so strangely refused for the most part to 
receive, since it has been revealed to them. Then we shall un- 



ISATAH, XIV. 28. : PIIILISTIA UNDER UZZIAH AND AHAZ, 169 



derstand that i the ichole family in heaven and earth ' is 
named of God and of Christ ; that the very meaning of the 
Gospel, the good news itself, is that, where sin has abounded grace 
shall much more abound, and reign (not unto death, but) unto 
eternal life. c As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all 
be made alive ; but every man in his own order. . . . And 
when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son 
also himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, 
that God may be all in all.' 

The author of the Book of Judges, with the political insight 
of this nation of prophets, points out how the inability of the 
Israelites to drive out the Philistines (among other nations) 
was the consequence of their losing their faith in their Lord 
and King, and with it their military as well as moral supe- 
riority ; and how this evil was yet, by God's providence, made 
to promote its own cure, the oppressions of the heathens 
stimulating them both 6 to learn war,' and to return from their 
idolatrous associations to the true faith.* The Philistines were 
very formidable enemies to Israel in the days of Samuel and of 
Saul. The strong kings, David, Solomon, and Jehoshaphat, 
kept them in subjection, but in the days of Jehoram they in- 
vaded Judah.f Uzziah again repressed them, and crippled their 
power, dismantling their walled cities, and building fortresses 
of his own to command them J; and no doubt they continued 
tributary during the still vigorous government of his successor 
Jotham. But during the weak reign of Ahaz, they 6 invaded 
the cities of the low country, and of the south of Judah ; ' and 
not only invaded, but settled themselves in them, and their 
neighbouring villages § : and to this state of things Isaiah addresses 
himself in this prophecy. And here as elsewhere we may notice 
the appropriateness of his language, indicating accurate know- 
ledge and lively imagination : the words ( gate' and c city,' and 
the threat that e famine ' shall be the chief, and the sword only the 
subordinate, instrument of their destruction, point to the strong- 
holds which characterised the Philistian power ; and the ( feed- 
ing' and 'lying down' of the defenceless Israelite alludes to 
the 'low country' which lay so open to its inroads. The rod 

* Judges, ii. 20. to iii. 4., which may be called the text to the whole book, 
f 2 Sam. v. 17—25., xxi. 15. ; 2 Chron. xvii. 11., xxi. 16, 17. 
% 2 Chron. xxvi. 6, 7. § 2 Chron. xxviii. 18. 



170 



HEBREW TOLITICS. 



of the taskmaster is Isaiah's frequent image for the control of 
a dependent and tributary nation : all Philistia had rejoiced 
when the rod of David and of Uzziah fell broken from the hands 
of Ahaz, and expressed their joy by wasting or taking posses- 
sion of their former master's lands ; but Isaiah warns them that 
the old root of Israel, which, from the days of Samson, had 
sent forth many a rod with a serpent's life, like the rod of Moses, 
would soon again produce a basilisk with its royal crest, its in- 
evitable spring, and its mortal bite, to take vengeance on his 
enemies. The 'first-born of the poor' seems to be a Hebrew 
idiom for the e really, eminently, poor,' like that of ( Son of Man' to 
to express the man. So Job uses the c first- born of death' (xviii. 
13.) for death itself, or a violent death; and the 6 sons of thunder' 
are persons of a thundering disposition — a striking phraseo- 
logy, apparently springing from the strong family feeling of 
the Hebrew. The Philistines had latterly so overrun and plun- 
dered the country, that there was neither food for the poor 
peasant and his family, nor safety for any who were too weak 
to protect themselves : but things shall soon be reversed ; those 
roots of Philistia, the five cities with their five lords, shall be 
reduced by famine though their walls hold out, and then the 
sword shall smite those who would escape. 

Thus far the prophet would seem to be predicting the recovery 
by Judah of its supremacy, in the expected event of the death 
of Ahaz, pointed to by the title : but then (ver. 31.), either as 
though he doubted whether Judah itself would effect the con~ 
quest, or more probably with an abrupt turn to the thought of 
the Assyrian power which he could see was preparing to sweep 
over all the southern nations, and Philistia among them, with a 
violence far greater than any a Judaean army could exert, he 
proceeds to say that they shall not only return to that subordi- 
nation which Judah enforced when it could; but that their 
whole polity should be dissolved : — for why ? 6 For there 
cometh from the north a smoke ; ' and when that smoke *, that 

* " Ac simul iEneas fumantes pulvere campos 

Prospexit longe, Laurentiaque agmina vidit" — Virg. 2En. xi. 908. 
" First was seen dust, like a white cloud," as the army of the Great King 
came on against the younger Cyrus. — Grote's Greece, ix. 58. 
When the peril from Attila and his Huns was imminent, Amianus bishop 



ASSYRIANS IN PHILISTIA. 



171 



too intelligible cloud of dust, draws nearer, it will reveal that 
army of which the fame is already striking terror into all the 
nations of the earth, the army which { has no straggler in its 
levies,' * and at the approach of which the strongest city may 
despair, and the councillors who sit in its gate change their 
wisest plans into lamentations. Then the Philistines will send 
ambassadors to propose to Judah some scheme of alliance and 
combined defence against the common foe; but the Lord's 
chosen people will reply — as it was the one, unvarying prin- 
ciple of Isaiah's policy that they ought to reply to all such pro- 
positions — that they will make no such alliance with heathens, 
but will put their trust in the Lord ; and when the flood of 
invasion spreads over the land, the defenceless inhabitants of the 
open country will take refuge in Zion, and there look to the 
Lord to keep his own city. c We tell our Lord God,' said 
Luther, f that if He will have His Church, He must keep it 
Himself, for we cannot do it ; and it is well for us that we 
cannot, else we should be the proudest asses under heaven.' 

Putting the few facts in the Hebrew records with the ampler 
statements in the Assyrian annals, the subsequent history of 
Philistia, and in which this prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled, 
stands thus: — Hezekiah made the Philistines once more tribu- 
tary to Judah f, and not improbably entered into some arrange- 
ments with the Egyptians for opposing the southward progress 
of the Assyrians, by means of garrisons in the strong fortresses 
of Philistia. Sargon, on the other hand, after the conquest of 
Damascus and Samaria, advanced to the west and south, and 
we presently find his general, Tartan, laying siege to Ashdod J, 
the ruler of which flies to Egypt, and the fortress falls, as do 

of Orleans sent " a messenger to observe from the ramparts the face of the 
distant country. . . In his third report he mentioned a small cloud ... at the 
extremity of the horizon. ... It is the aid of God, exclaimed the bishop, 
. . . and the whole multitude repeated after him, It is the aid of God. The 
remote object became each moment larger . . . the Roman and Gothic ban- 
ners were gradually perceived ; and a favourable wind blowing aside the 
dust, discovered in deep array, the impatient squadrons of iEtius and Theo- 
doric, who pressed forward to the relief of Orleans." — Gibbon, Decline and 
Fall, ch. xxxv. 

* Compare the description in chapter v. ver. 26 — 30. 

j* 2 Kings, xviii. 8. j Isaiah, xx. 1 



172 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



those of Gaza and Askelon, where also Sargon found Egyptian 
commandants.* Sennacherib, on coming to the throne, found 
that the Philistian lords, like Hezekiah, were refusing to pay 
the tribute imposed on them by his predecessors: so, after 
visiting Tyre and Sidon with the like purpose, he proceeded to 
Philistia, and of what he did there he gives the following- 
account : — " Sitka of Ascalon, who did not come to pay me 
homage, the gods of his house, and his treasures, his sons and 
his daughters, and his brothers of the house of his father, I 
seized and sent off to Nineveh. I placed another chief [name 
illegible] on the throne of Ascalon, and I imposed on him the 
regulated amount of tribute. In the autumn of the year certain 
other cities, which had refused to submit to my authority, I 
took and plundered. The nobles and the people of Ekron 
having expelled their king, Haddiya, and the Assyrian troops 
who garrisoned the town, attached themselves to Hezekiah of 
Judaea, and paid their adoration to his god [the name is lost]. 
The kings of Egypt also sent horsemen and footmen, belonging 
to the army of the king of Miruhka [Meroe, or ^Ethiopia], of 
which the numbers could not be counted. In the neighbour- 
hood of the city of Allakhis [Lachish] I joined battle with 
them. The captains of the cohorts, and the young men of the 
kings of Egypt, and the captains of the cohorts of the king of 
' Meroe,' I put to the sword in the country of Lubana [Libnah]. 
Afterwards I moved to the city of Ekron, and the chiefs of the 
people having humbled themselves, I admitted them into my 
service ; but the young men I carried into captivity, to inhabit 
the cities of Assyria. Their goods and wealth I also plundered 
to an untold amount. Their king, Haddiya, I then brought 
back from the city of Jerusalem, and again placed in authority 
over them, imposing on him the regulated tribute of the empire; 
and because Hezekiah, king of Judaaa, did not submit to my 
yoke, forty-six of his strong fenced cities, and innumerable 
smaller towns which depended on them, I took and plundered ; 
but I left to him Jerusalem, his capital city, and some of the 
inferior towns around it. The cities which I had taken and 
plundered I detained from the government of Hezekiah, and 
distributed between the kings of Ashdod, and Ascalon, and 

* Rawlinson's Commentary, pp. 62, 63. 66. 



ALLIANCES AGAINST ASSYRIA, 



173 



Ekron, and Gazah ; and having thus enlarged the territory of 
these chiefs, I imposed on them a corresponding increase of 
tribute over that to which they had formerly been subjected." * 
The learned translators of these annals admit many of these 
details to be still doubtful : but the general purport of their 
two versions is the same ; and if it be in the main correct, we 
see that the Egyptian alliance which Isaiah more specifically 
denounces hereafter, was a part of a great political system of 
combined defence against Assyria; and then the similarity of 
the prophet's c burdens ' of Tyre and Moab to this of Philistia, 
suggests the probability that they too were members of the 
system, and throws a new light on Isaiah's purpose in making 
them the subjects of his discourse. We shall have to return to 
this alliance : here we may observe, that on this, as on so many 
other occasions, Isaiah foretells what ought to have been, and 
would have been, if it had not been prevented by want of faith 
in the Jewish government and people : he gives the answer 
which Hezekiah ought to have returned to the proposals of the 
Philistines : Sennacherib's annals tell us what answer the Jewish 
king did return, and how he was punished for it. Yet, in the 
end, God's plan and purpose, and His prophet's declaration of 
it, were fulfilled : after they had tried to save themselves by 
their own policy, they did in the end, and in their extremity, 
turn to their Lord to save them. Such is the usual history, 
not of the Jews only, but of Christian nations and Christian 
individuals now. We have premonitions of God's plan; we 
try and substitute a self-willed caricature of it; and when that 
fails, we turn and accept His Will. 

* Rawlinson's Outline, p. 23. Compare Dr. Hincks's version in Layard's 
Nineveh and Babylon, p. 143. 



174 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER XI. 

ISAIAH XV., XVI. I MO A3 PROBABLY REDUCED BY SHALMANESER. — HIS- 
TORY OP MOAB — PICTURE OF ITS OVERTHROW. TRIBUTE OF LAMBS 

DUE TO JUDAH. FRIENDSHIP WITH JUDAH ADVISED. MODERN DIS- 
TINCTION BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND SPIRITUAL LIFE. — • CORPORATE 
UNITY OF A STATE. 

The 6 Burden of Moab.' — The place and the contents of this 
prophecy agree to indicate that it was delivered about the same 
time with the preceding; that is, in the last year of Ahaz, 
or the first of Hezekiah. The only historical reference to its 
fulfilment, which it threatens shall certainly be within three 
years from its delivery, is what we may consider to lie in 
Sennacherib's mention of Budastor, king of Bcth-Ammon, as 
one of the kings who tf repaired to his presence in the neigh- 
bourhood of the city of Tyre, with their accustomed tribute,' 
in the third year of his annals.* But Moab can hardly have 
escaped the lot of all the neighbouring nations at this period 
of Assyrian conquest : and at no time was it more likely to be 
invaded than when Shalmaneser came up to besiege Samaria, 
in the third year of Hezekiah. The adoption of this prophecy 
by Jeremiah, shows that Moab, like other nations threatened by 
Isaiah, was again a flourishing people, and destined to suffer a re- 
newed and severer fulfilment of the judgment originally pro- 
nounced. 

The Moabites, a collateral tribe of the Hebrew race, had 
(before the departure of the latter from Egypt) established 
themselves in a territory from which they had driven out the 
Emims, and which extended from Zoar at the southern extremity 
of the Dead Sen, to the river Jabbok on the north, and was 
bounded on the west by that sea and the Jordan, and on the 



* Rawlinson's Outline, p. 22. 



HISTORY OF MOAB. 



175 



east by the desert. But not many years before the children of 
Israel took possession of the land of Canaan, Sihon king of 
the Ainorites, who then dwelt in Canaan, passed the Jordan, 
conquered all that part of Moab which lies between the rivers 
Jabbok and Arnon, left the Moabites only the tract south of 
the latter river, and made Heshbon his capital, 

Moses had commanded the Israelites to respect the territory 
and the rights of Moab, as he had those of Edom and Ammon, 
and he would have passed peaceably through the kingdom of 
Sihon, but the latter refused to permit him, and gave him 
battle ; and, on his defeat, Moses took possession of his newly 
acquired territory, and divided it between Reuben and Gad. 
Balak, king of Moab, took alarm, though unmolested ; but after 
an alliance with the Midianites, and taking the prophet Balaam 
to their counsels, they thought it more politic to conciliate than 
to attack the strangers. And from this time the relations of 
the two peoples were sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly. 
In the days of the Judges, Eglon, king of Moab, made Israel 
tributary for eighteen years, but he was killed by Ehud, and 
the yoke broken. A time of peace then appears to have 
succeeded, in which we see, from the story of Ruth, that not 
merely friendly intercourse, but even intermarriage took place. 
Saul made war on the Moabites, and David reduced them to be 
tributaries. After the separation of theTen Tribes from Judah, 
Moab continued a province of the former kingdom, and the 
tribute paid to Ahab was 6 a hundred thousand lambs, and a 
hundred thousand rams, with the wool,' for f Moab was a sheep- 
master.' At the death of Ahab the Moabites rebelled against 
his son Joram, who, with the aid of Judah and Edom, defeated 
the rebels in a great battle, and laid waste their land ; but it 
has been inferred that they were not effectually conquered, and 
were shortly able to make war on Jehoshaphat in revenge for 
his late alliance against them. About fifty years after, we find 
marauding 6 bands of the Moabites ' entering the territory of 
Ephraim, as though they were either independent or in revolt. 
And after a further silence of history for more than a century, 
we here find Moab not only a flourishing and independent 
kingdom, but in unquestioned possession of the ancient lands 
and cities of Reuben and Gad. Moab had, as Jeremiah com- 



176 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



plains of Ammon, become 'the heir of Israel*,' and the ab- 
sence of even so much of protest from this prophecy of Isaiah, 
seems to indicate that the possession was, partly at least, held 
by old prescriptive right. Some of the cities, though granted by 
Moses to Reuben and Gad, may have continued in the hands 
of their former possessors, as those of Philistia did ; and the 
Moabite power and territory would probably extend itself as 
the strength and population of the kingdom of Ephraim decayed, 
till the Assyrian deportations of the latter, of which more than 
one had already occurred, ended any remaining disputes. 

The god of Moab is called Chemosh and Baal-Peor : the 
the latter name is explained to mean Baal of Mount Peor, the 
mount to which Balak took Balaam to curse Israel, and which 
was, perhaps, the chief place of their worship. The national 
character and national worship were, no doubt, as intimately 
related as they are found to be in all nations which have left 
sufficient means of information on the subject. Whether such 
means exist in the present case must be decided by a pro- 
founder insight than I possess. 

The vision of the overthrow of Moab rises before the prophet. 
Ar-Moab, or Rabbath-Moab, — ( Moab's City,' — of which the 
ruins, under the name of Mab, or Erabba, may still be seen on 
the south of the Arnon, is cut off by an attack unexpected as 
the thief in the night : so is Kir — c Moab's Wall,' or 6 fortress,' 
— which, a castle on a rocky hill, a few miles south-east of Ar, 
still tells the traveller of its importance, by the remains of its 
church and mosque, and by the name of Karrak-Moba, which 
it gives to its no longer resident bishop, and to the whole 
tract which was once Moab. He sees the people with heads 
and beards shaven in token of grief, girt with sackcloth, 
dissolved in tears, and uttering loud lamentations ; going up to 
the high places of their gods at Bajith and at Dibon, to entreat 
for aid ; wandering through the streets ; collecting in the market- 
places, or open squares near the gate, where the last news of 
the enemy, or of the plans of the government, might be heard ; 
or retiring to their house-tops to supplicate their household 



* Jer, xlix. 1, 



isaiah xv.l.— 9.: destruction of the state. 



177 



gods, or mourn in private over the fate of their families and 
themselves.* Heshbon, the royal city of the Amorites ; be- 
stowed on Reuben and on Gad and his Levites at different 
times ; famous for its fish-pools ; and, like the neighbouring 
Elealeh, still to be found by name in the highlands of Gilead 
opposite Jericho; makes its cry of despair — a cry which even 
the warriors of Moab raise instead of their battle- shout — heard 
afar, for men's very life is a burden to them. The prophet may 
have little love for Moab, but his heart cannot but be touched 
by such utter woe ; for he sees the whole people flying from 
their houses, towards Zoar, on their southern frontier, as their 
father Lot had once fled to the same city, in his extremity. 
They fly as the heifer in her prime, and when her voice is 
deepest, flies from the first attempt to bring her under the yoke : 
he sees them weeping as they go up the hill of Luhith, on their 
way to Zoar, and he hears their broken cries as they descend 
again by the road of Horonaim. Then half-retaining, half- 
changing the image of the heifer, the prophet explains the 
cause of their flight to be, that the waters, and consequently 
the green fields, of Nimrim, or Nimra, near Heshbon, which, 
because it had the rare blessing of water, was a fertile valley, 
and a coveted pasture for cattle f , f are desolations 5 — struck by 
drought, whether conceived as a poetical image, or as the actual 
result of the cutting of water-courses in war. The invader is 
upon them, and their only remaining chance is to cross the 

* Vitringa quotes Justin's description of Athens (lib. v. c. 7.), when news 
had arrived of the loss of Conon and his army : " Quae cuncta cum Athenis 
nunciata essent, omnes relictis domibus per urbem discurrere pavidi ; alius 
alium sciscitari ; auctorem nuncii requirere ; non pueros imprudentia ; non 
senes debilitas ; non mulieres sexus imbecillitas domi tenet : adeo ad omnem 
aetatem tanti mali sensus penetraverat. In foro deinde coeunt, atque ibi 
perpeti nocte fortunam publicam questibus iterant. Alii fratres, filios, aut 
patres, deflent," &c. &c. And of Cartbage (lib. xix. c. 2.), after the de- 
struction of Imilco's army in Sicily : " Quae res cum nunciata Carthagini esset, 
moesta civitas fuit ; omnia ululatibus, non secus ac si urbs ipsa capta esset, 
person abant Cuncti deinde ad portum congregantur," &c. Com- 
pare, too, the descriptions of Syracuse expecting the Carthaginians ; and of 
the population of Himera, Agrigentum, and Gela, flying from them. — 
Grote's History of Greece, x. 599. 

f Numbers, xxxii. 3. 38. ; Josh. xiii. 27. 

N 



178 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



e Brook of Willows' (now called Wady-el-Ahsa, and forming 
now, as then, the boundary of the land), carrying with them 
what they can of the wealth which long peace had enabled 
them to accumulate. The cry and the howling spread even 
beyond the frontiers of Moab, and shall be heard at the ' Well 
of Princes,' where Israel once found water in the desert, and 
in their joy sang that song, 6 Spring, O Well,' destined to 
endure with their own name for ever. The channel of Dimon 
shall run blood instead of water : and if any escape the sword, 
upon them the Lord will bring lions : — a threat which may be 
understood literally, as we have accounts of the actual appear- 
ance of these beasts on the west bank of the Jordan, the 
thickets of which they seem to have frequented. As long as 
national order and prosperity continued, the wild beasts would 
be kept under, and driven back to their woods and mountains ; 
but in times of anarchy, when the population was diminished, 
the fields not fenced in, the cattle not watched, and the roads 
not kept in constant use by traffic, they would prowl in quest 
of prey through the land. 

The expression of ( sending the lamb ' is clearly explained 
by the account already referred to, of the mode in which the 
tribute of Moab was paid during its dependence on Israel. A 
more difficult question arises from the mention of Sela — ( the 
Rock' — which it seems most straightforward to take here, as in 
2 Kings, xiv. 7., to be Petra, the chief city of Edom : and we 
must then suppose that it had fallen into the power of Moab, 
perhaps at the time when this nation made itself obnoxious to 
the denunciation of Amos, Isaiah's elder contemporary, for some 
savage outrage on Edom * ; or that Sela is here mentioned, 
not as in possession of Moab, but to indicate that the required 
flocks would be collected most conveniently in the pasture 
grounds near that city, whether they already belonged to the 
Moabites, or were to be purchased from Edom. The 6 wilder- 
nesses' and e deserts' of the Bible answer (with due allowance 
for the difference of climate and consequent vegetation) to 
what we call moors or commons, uninhabited, but fit for 
pasture. The wilderness here referred to was probably the tract 



* Amos, ii. 1. 



ISAIAH XVI. 1 — 10. : FRIENDSHIP WITH JUDAH ADVISED. 170 



between Petra and Juckea, which Strabo calls sprjfios, and 
Jerome desertum ; and Sela may have been the head-station of 
the shepherds who frequented these plains with their vast 
flocks, and where they found such protection and water as 
Uzziah is said to have provided for his flocks by making 
e towers and wells in the desert.' 

Isaiah, after declaring the woes that are coming on the people 
of Moab, calls them to submit themselves again to their right- 
ful lord-paramount, by sending the tribute as in former times. 
The image of the Daughter of Zion sitting in royal dignity sug- 
gests that of the daughters of Moab in flight ; and this the two 
images of the undignified peasant or female slave wading 
through a river, and that of young birds losing their nest and 
struggling at the risk of their lives.* And then the abrupt turn 
of expression seems to indicate that he is suddenly conscious of 
the apparent impropriety of a Jew in the unhappy reign of 
Ahaz, when his own country was in the depths of humiliation 
and distress, thus addressing the haughty Moab, which was still 
in all its prosperity and pride, and at the very moment a place 
of refuge for the Israelites, who were flying from their own land 
to avoid military inroads on every side, and also the extortion of 
tribute, which, from the way in which Isaiah constantly speaks 
of it, would seem to have been collected by the Assyrians 
themselves : and therefore, while repeating the prediction which 
he had lately made to the Philistines, that the throne of David 
would shortly be established in its former power, and giving 
this as the reason why Moab had better return to his allegiance, 
he makes it also a reason why meanwhile the Hebrew fugitives 
should be treated with less pride and wrath. 

The old way of understanding this as the address of Isaiah to 
Moab, seems to me to give a more coherent sense than the 
modern supposition, that it is the petition of Moab which ac- 
companies the lambs. 

But, the prophet adds, such arguments will be in vain; 
we know his proud and cruel character too well. This in- 
solence is spoken of as the national character of Moab and 
Ammon by Jeremiah (xlviii. 27 — 30.) and Zephaniah (ii. 8 — 

* Compare chap, xlvii. 1 — 9. 
n 2 



180 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



10.), and we find Sanballat of Horonaim (in Moab), and 
Tobiah the Ammonite, mocking, in the old spirit of their 
people, the builders of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. But his 
pride shall not prevail ; his boasting will prove a lie in the 
end. The land of Moab was famous then, as it is still, for 
its pastures and its vineyards ; and in renewing his warning 
of the destruction at hand, Isaiah now takes his images 
from the latter, as before from the former, feature of the 
country. He sees f Heshbon and Elealeh, and the flowery dale 
of Sibmah clad with vines,' wasted by the ruthless invaders, who 
break down those plants so famous for their choice fruit, and 
so luxuriant in their growth, that nature and man combined to 
carry them beyond the limits of the desert and over the sea. 
This tf sea' may either be the Dead Sea, or, as Jeremiah under- 
stands it, a lake at Jazer, though none has been found there 
now. The prophet's sympathy is so excited that he weeps for 
Sibmah, as J azer and its people themselves may weep ; and if 
their watercourses are cut off, he will supply the loss with his 
tears. The wheat and barley were the spring-harvest ; but the 
joy of the summer-harvest, when the fruits, the olives and the 
grapes, were gathered in to repay the toils of the year, would be 
the greater : but the singing and the shouting in the vineyard 
and at the wine-press are not now heard; their vintage-shout 
has ceased, for other gatherers and treaders are come, and the 
battle-shout is heard in its stead. 

Kir-hareseth and Kir-haresh are understood to be other 
names for Kir- Moab, mentioned above. Sibmah was in the 
neighbourhood of Heshbon. The expression ' my bowels shall 
sound like a harp for Moab,' employs a favourite image of the 
Hebrew poets. The ancients would not have understood the 
feeling which makes such allusions repulsive to modern taste, 
while we acknowledge their appropriateness and force. We 
shrink from such undisguised mention, in words, of the more 
grossly animal functions, just as we do from the unrestrained 
utterance of such ' howlings ' as are attributed to Moab in 
the chapters before us, and which would not have seemed de- 
grading to a Greek or Roman any more than to a Hebrew. 
And the best explanation is that which has been given of the 
latter fact by the author of ' Guesses at Truth ; ' namely, that 



ISAIAH XVI. 11 — 14.: CORPORATE UNITY OF A STATE. 181 



Christianity has so clearly established the distinction between 
flesh and spirit, that every man, woman, and child can feel it to 
be disgraceful that our animal nature should, even under the 
most trying circumstances, have its own way, and cease to be 
under the authority of our human will. Self-possession and 
self-control are no longer virtues to be exhibited only by great 
men on great occasions, but to be the ordinary habit of all of us 
at all times. 

When Moab finds that he is wearying himself to no purpose 
by his sacrifices on the high places, he shall try whether prayers 
in his temples will be more effectual ; but both shall be in vain. 
These judgments have been hanging over the head of Moab 
from of old : but now the time of their accomplishment is near ; 
it shall be within three years, to be understood literally and 
precisely as they would be in the hiring a servant for such a 
term. There is no occasion, though no objection (except what 
lies against all unnecessary conjectures), to suppose that verses 
13. and 14. are a postscript added to the prophecy, itself of 
earlier date : it is just as easy to understand them as parts of 
one whole. 

We may notice here, though the observation applies equally 
to all like occasions, that Moab is a Person in the eyes of the 
prophet ; for this much better expresses the case than to speak 
of a personification. This sense of the corporate unity of a 
nation was much stronger among the ancients, as it was in the 
middle ages, than anything we feel now in our political com- 
munities, which are so much larger, and with such much more 
complicated interests than those of former times. Our old 
legal forms, by which an association of men is c incorporated,' 
with perpetual succession, power to sue and be sued, and to 
use a common seal, as though a single person ; as well as those 
which erect individual personages, such as the sovereign, the 
bishop, the parson, and so on, into 'corporations sole,' with 
the legal powers of a corporate body ; are illustrations of the 
mediaeval feeling. If we have lost something, we have also 
gained something by the change ; for it has been effected in a 
great degree by a healthy growth and expansion of patriotism 
towards philanthropy, if it must also in some respects be re- 
ferred to a depression of the patriotic by the selfish temper. 

N 3 



182 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



The Romish, and I must add the Anglican, Churches are 
warnings of the evil of endeavouring to restrict the catholic 
spirit within the limits of a formal and finite personality of this 
kind, in opposition to the indications of God's providence, no 
less than His express declarations, that the highest unity is 
that of the spirit and not of the letter.* 

It seems to me unnecessary to notice the reasons which are 
advanced for attributing this prophecy to some other writer 
than Isaiah. 

Jeremiah has recast its component parte in a new form ; as 
he has the prophecies against Babylon ; and in each case with 
the same indications that he is not the original author. 

* M. Bunsen gives a very clear statement of the philosophic grounds — of 
the essentially real and rational basis — of the personality of societies as 
well as individuals ; and of its adequate realisation in the Christian Church, 
as the finite manifestation of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. — Hip- 
polytus and his Age, ii. 32 — 52. I strongly commend the passage to all 
students. 



ISAIAH XVII., XVIII. : DAMASCUS AND EPHRAIM. 183 



CHAPTER XII. 
isaiah, xvn., xvm.: Damascus, ephraim, and Ethiopia. — probable date 

AND UNITY OF THIS PROPHECY. THE RDSH OF NATIONS. THE GENERAL 

PANIC. WORLDLY ALLIANCES. GOd's DELIVERANCE. NOTION OF THIS 

PROPHECY BEING A MYTH NOT WELL FOUNDED. 

The old division between chapters xvii. and xviii. (as in the 
Authorised Version) indicates the old opinion, that a distinct 
prophecy begins with the latter chapter, though it might be a 
question whether verses 12, 13, and 14. of the former one were a 
fragment detached from both, or the conclusion of that entitled 
( The Burden of Damascus,' but which relates still more to Eph- 
raiin, the ally of Damascus at the beginning of the reign of Ahaz. 
The modern opinion is in favour of considering that the former 
prophecy ends with verse 1 1 . of chapter xvii. ; and that its date is 
the same as that of chapter viii. — ix. 7., namely, the year in 
which the northern tribes of Israel were carried away by As- 
syria, and which deportation is supposed to have taken place 
the year before that of the inhabitants of Damascus. And the 
remaining verses of chapter xvii. are taken as the beginning of a 
new prophecy, ending with the end of chapter xviii., from which 
they should never have been divided ; while its date is referred 
to the same period as that of chapter xx., when the Assyrians 
were actually beginning to overflow the borders of Judah, and 
the ministers and people of Hezekiah were looking to Tirhakeh, 
king of Ethiopia and Egypt, for help. 

Yet there is some force in the argument that in this part of 
the book, where a series of titles seems to define the beginning 
and end of each portion, we should take the two chapters as one 
whole; that the under-current of thought common to verses 11. 
and 14. of chapter xvii., with verse 5. of chapter xviii., is in 
favour of the continuity of the text ; and that there is also a 
unity of idea pervading this whole, and corresponding with that 

N 4 



184 



HEBREW POLITICS 



which we have noticed running through chapters vii., vh'L, ix., x., 
xi., xii., and giving them greatly the character of a continuous 
whole, though that whole may be made up of portions originally 
separate. The train of ideas which unites those chapters is, 
that Judah need not fear the hostile alliance of Syria and 
Ephraim against her, nor yet seek for help from Assyria or 
Egypt, if only she will trust in her own Lord, and true Pro- 
tector ; that since she will not trust in Him, she shall be herself 
overwhelmed by the heathen powers she calls in, and thus pu- 
nished for her own loss of faith, and propensity to idols, even 
though these powers deliver her from her immediate alarm ; but 
that at the last a righteous kino; shall reign in Sion over the re- 
stored remnant of both Judah and Ephraim, and all the nations 
of the earth shall acknowledge his dominion. And a similar 
thread of thought may be found running through the two chap- 
ters now before us, — which open with the destruction of Da- 
mascus and Israel; refer the calamities of the latter to his 
abandonment of his true Lord, who shall yet preserve a remnant 
of His people ; and predict the destruction of the Assyrian as 
soon as he has fulfilled his office of the scourge of God, and the 
actual recognition of the Name of the Lord of hosts by Egypt 
and Ethiopia. There is an essential resemblance between the 
two, with a difference in the proportions of their parts : Damascus 
and Ephraim become less prominent in the latter than the for- 
mer, while the slight mention of Egypt in verse 18. of chapter 
vii., apparently indicating that the politicians of the day were 
just thinking of the possibility of an alliance with that power, 
is replaced by a reference to the altered state of things when 
that alliance was actively promoted by the government of Heze- 
kiah, as their only support against Assyria. But no date can 
easily be fixed for a composition of which the beginning seems 
closely connected with the first year of Ahaz, while the end 
points towards the fourteenth of Hezekiah, — unless, indeed, we 
suppose with Grotius that the prophet here refers to a second 
destruction of Damascus just before that of Samaria, which was 
completed in the sixth year of Hezekiah ; but of this we have 
no account in history, though there is nothing improbable in 
it. It will only remain, then, in support of the unity of these 
two chapters, to suppose that, though originally written at dif- 



ISAIAH XVII. : THE PROBABLE DATE. 



185 



ferent times, they were blended into one by Isaiah himself, 
with such obliterations of the original dates, or evidence of dates, 
as the fusion might seem to him to require. Such revisions, 
and consequent obliterations, by the author himself are common 
in modern books, where we can trace the process. Biographical 
puzzles may one day arise from the fact that there exists a ma- 
nuscript of some of Coleridge's poems, in his own hand, where 
e Mary 5 is found instead of the 6 Sara' of the published edi- 
tions : and the higher criticism may expend its powers in ex- 
plaining how the reprint of Sir J. Stephen's article in No. 136. 
of the f Edinburgh Review,' notices a book published ten years 
after the date of that number. It is not material in which way 
we decide the present doubt, or whether we leave it undecided. 

e Damascus,' says Alexander, f is still the most flourishing 
city in western Asia. It is also one of the most ancient. It is 
here mentioned as the capital of a kingdom, called Syria of 
Damascus, to distinguish it from other Syrian principalities, and 
founded in the reign of David by Rezon. (1 Kings, xi. 23, 24.) 
It was commonly at war with Israel, particularly during the 
reigns of Benhadad and Hazael, so that a three years' peace 
is recorded as a long one. (1 Kings, xxii. 1.)' With the alli- 
ance of its last king Rezin with Pekah, king of Israel, and its 
results, we are already familiar. 

There are two Aroers mentioned on the east of Jordan, one 
near the Arnon, and the other to the north, and near the 
Ammonite city of Rabbah * ; and the cities of Aroer here spoken 
of may be the cities and villages of Gad and Reuben in the dis- 
trict between the two Aroers, or more immediately about the 
northern one, which will connect them with the deportation of 
Tiglath-Pileser, referred to on former occasions. 

The prophet threatens the two nations with a common de- 
struction ; the glory of Damascus shall be as the glory of Israel 
in the day in which the strength of the latter is wasted away 
with the emaciation of mortal disease, and his wealth is carried 
away as the whole crop of corn is carried away in harvest time. 
But then Isaiah substitutes an image not so strong : the 
gleaner follows the reaper of corn, and leaves nothing behind ; 



* Josh. xii. 2., xiii. 16. 25. ; Numb, xxxii. 34. 



186 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



but the most active shaking and beating of the olive-tree leaves 
a few berries on the uppermost boughs ; and such a remnant 
will be left of Israel, though the once strong cities, which 
are left for its sake, will be left in the humblest, most de- 
fenceless condition. Such a remnant we know did, after the 
general deportation of the ten tribes, accept Hezekiah's in- 
vitation, and return to the right worship of the Lord at Jeru- 
salem, as they did again in the time of Josiah.* In that day 
the judgment on the nation, and the mercy shown to the 
penitent few, will alike bear witness against their past idola- 
tries and forgetfulness of the God of their salvation. And 
then Isaiah, in his usual manner, blends with the previous 
image of the Assyrians reaping a harvest of cities and their 
inhabitants, the new one of the Israelites transplanting hea- 
then gods into their worship, and reaping God's abandon- 
ment of their nation as the fruit ; while both images connect 
themselves in the mind with the thought of the actual wasting of 
fields and vineyards through the country, by the ruthless invaders. 

On a former occasion Isaiah had said, ' The Lord spake unto 
me, saying, Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of 
Siloah that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son ; 
now therefore behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters 
of the river, strong and many, the king of Assyria, and all his 
glory : and he shall come up over all his channels, and go over 
all his banks ; and he shall pass through Judah ; he shall 
overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck ; and the 
stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, 
O Immanuel.' And now he hears the sound of these mighty 
and many waters, while f the nations rush like the rushing of 
many waters,' and e make a noise like the noise of the seas.'f 
But he is calm and self-possessed as ever ; he holds to his old 
faith and doctrine : * God shall rebuke them, and they shall 
flee afar oif, like chaff, when the wind whirls it from the 
threshing-floor on the hill-side.' 

* 2 Chron. xxx. 11., xxxiv. 6, 9. 

f " Qualia fluctus 

iEquorei faciunt, si quis procul audiat ipsos, 

Tale sonat populus." 

Ovid. Met. xv. 604. (Alexander from Clericus.) 



ISAIAH XVIII. : EGYPT AND ETHIOPIA. 



187 



Though the general sense of the eighteenth chapter is clear, 
there is great doubt as to the translation and meaning of parti- 
cular phrases. It is not agreed whether ' shadowing,' or 
' rustling wings,' or ' winged cymbal ' be the proper render- 
ing ; nor whether (to leave less likely explanations) it refers to 
the mountain ridges, or the armies (as in chapter viii. 8.), or the 
boats with sails or shaped like the cymbal. It is questioned 
whether the 'sea' in verse 2. is the Nile, or the Red Sea, or 
the Mediterranean ; and also what is the meaning of the epithets 
applied to the 'people' and 'nation' in verses 2. and 7., and 
whether these are to be taken to indicate Egypt and Ethiopia 
respectively, or both together as one power under Sabaco, or 
Tirhakeh. But the general sense is that Egypt and Ethiopia, 
like Philistia and Moab, share the general panic at the approach 
of the great northern conqueror; and, as in the former case, 
Isaiah supposes ambassadors coming to Jerusalem, to propose an 
alliance against the common foe, and replies*, as before, that the 
Lord will defend His own without the help of man. 

Alexander, with his wonted clearness of judgment on such 
points, observes that there is no need to depart from the literal, 
which is, indeed, the better, sense of verse 3., and that we 
should read thus : — ' All ye inhabitants of the world, and 
dwellers on the earth, shall see as it were the lifting up 
of an ensign on the mountains^ and shall hear as it were the 
blowing of a trumpet.' That is, the prophet calls on all the 
earth to expect the signal of a great deliverance, which shall 
come with a sudden blow from the Lord, who is at present 
waiting for the fulness of time, keeping the world in a suspense 
like the stillness of a noonday heat, yet giving those who trust 
in Him a quiet confidence, like that dewy cloud which supplies a 
certain freshness even in the midst of such heat. 

We may notice again Isaiah's usual accuracy and appropriate- 
ness of thought, in the reference to the Egyptian traffic by 
water, and especially to the light papyrus boats — ' Conseritur 
bibula Memphitis cymba papyro,'* — and to the nation 'whose 
land the rivers divide ;' also the change, of the word ' nation ' 

* Lucan, iv. 136. So Pliny says (xiii., 11.), 'Ex ipso quidam papyro 
navigia texunt.' Both quoted by Lowtli. 



188 HEBREW POLITICS. 

in verse 2. into e people' in verse 7., — the former properly 
designating a heathen, and the latter a believing, people. 

The remarkable correspondence between the predictions in 
verses 13, 14. of chapter xvii. and verses 3 — 7. of chap, xviii., 
with the historical account of the sudden overthrow of Senna- 
cherib, has induced some of the Germans to pronounce that the 
latter is a myth framed to agree with the prophecy. As the 
reaction against the contrary assertion that it is a miraculous pre- 
diction, such a notion is perhaps not to be wondered at ; but 
the really rational, as well as really Christian student, may come 
to the conclusion that if we simply and honestly take the facts of 
the case, the prophecy and the history as they actually are, it 
is possible to discover something more of the meaning, the law, 
of prophecy and the prophetic faculty, than has been discovered, 
or than will be discovered, by combining either scepticism or 
superstition with grammatical and antiquarian knowledge. 



ISAIAH XIX. I i THE BURDEN OF EGYPT.' 189 



CHAPTER XIII. 

EGYPTIAN DYNASTIES IN THE TIME OF ISAIAH COTEMPORARY OR SUCCES- 
SIVE. HISTORICAL NOTICES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES. ANARCHY. INVA- 
SION OF SARGON. SACK OF THEBES. — TREATY BETWEEN EGYPT AND 

ASSYRIA. MULTITUDE OF GODS AND OF CASTES UNFAVOURABLE TO POLITI- 
CAL UNITY. EXCLUSIVE WISDOM OF PRIESTHOOD. THE CITY OF DESTRUC- 
TION. — ALEXANDER AND PTOLEMY. — TEMPLE OF ONIAS. SEPTUAGINT. 

PHILO. CHURCH OF ALEXANDRIA. BACON ON PROPHECY. 

f The Burden of Egypt.' Within the limits of Isaiah's life- 
time, we find kings of the Tanitic, Saitic, and Ethiopian dynas- 
ties reigning in Egypt. Gesenius adopts the view which takes 
these dynasties to have been cotemporary, with their respective 
seats of government at Sais in the west, Tanis in the east, and 
Thebes in the south. In Zet, the last of the Tanitic (or 23rd) 
dynasty, he recognises the Sethos whom Herodotus mentions in 
connection with Sennacherib's overthrow : in the conquests, 
expulsions, or murders of Saitic by Ethiopian kings ; and in the 
civil wars or anarchy which began and ended the fifteen years of 
the Dodecarchy, when the country was subdivided into twelve 
independent governments, he finds the counterpart of the political 
confusions which Isaiah depicts : and in the re-union of these 
governments into one monarchy by Psammeticus, he sees, with 
Grotius, the fulfilment of the prophet's threat that Egypt should 
be 6 given into the hand of a cruel lord.' He then endeavours 
to show that the Dodecarchy was drawing to a close at the 
beginning of the reign of Manasseh, into which it is not impos- 
sible that Isaiah may have lived, and before which time he 
thinks that he could not have uttered this prophecy. But nei- 
ther in Egypt, nor in any other country, can a general dissolu- 
tion of government be other than the result of causes long at 
work, and long discernible to the enlightened statesman; and 
here, in particular, would it be the less necessary to account for 
the insight which could anticipate both anarchy and its termina- 



190 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



tion in despotism, a few years before the occurrence of either, 
when we see that Isaiah exercised a prescience which discerned 
the general tendency of Egyptian history for ages after ; and 
therefore the date given to this prophecy by its place in the 
book, would be at least as suitable as that of Gesenius, even if 
we accepted his interpretation of its contents. 

But Hitzig has pointed out that it not only requires much 
straining of the chronology to bring Psammeticus to the date at 
which Gesenius fixes the beginning of his reign, but that the 
4 cruel lord ' is a more fitting description of a foreign conqueror 
than a native prince, and that it is in all respects suitable to 
Sargon. M. Bunsen makes an interval of forty-one, instead of 
eighteen, years between the overthrow of Sennacherib and the 
re-union of the Egyptian states under Psammeticus; and he 
says, that all Egyptologists are agreed that Manetho's dynasties 
between the 18th and 30th are not synchronous, though he 
elsewhere explains that the regular succession of kings' names 
in these lists does not necessarily indicate that each was the 
actual ruler of the country during the period thus assigned to 
him, since their position may have been something like that of 
Louis XVII. and Louis XVIII. during the first French Re- 
public and Empire.* It remains to be seen whether the trans- 
lation of Sennacherib's Annals f, in which he distinguishes 
between 6 the kings of Egypt' and the tf king of Meroe ' under 
whose command they appear, will be established ; and how far it 
must, in that case, restore the opinion (thus set aside by M. 
Bunsen) of the existence of cotemporary dynasties at the period 
in question — an opinion which is favoured by the language of 
Isaiah in the chapter before us, where he speaks of e Egypt (not 
6 the Egyptians ' in the original) set against Egypt, city against 
city, and kingdom against kingdom,' and mentions the e princes 
of Zoan' or Tanis, and the s princes of Xoph,' or Memphis. I 
have given these specimens of the many perplexed and contra- 
dictory materials with which we have to deal, the rather because 
they may perhaps be taken as themselves among the indications 
that the political state of Egypt did at this time exhibit more or 

* Aegyptens Stelle, i. 121., iii. 128 — 146. 
f See page 172. above. 



HISTORICAL NOTICES OF EGYPT. 



191 



less of the anarchy here described by the prophet ; and that the 
reason why Herodotus and the other historians received and 
transmitted such confused accounts, may have been that the 
events were confused. I now add such a reconciliation of the 
various facts and conclusions as I am able, and as seems to me 
most in accordance with the rest of the history of the period ; 
premising that the general condition of the country and its 
politics must have been that of anarchy, revolution, and foreign 
invasion, whatever were the acts of particular kings and armies. 
The w T ise king Bocchoris, of Sais, who laboured to define and 
enforce the rights of his people by just and liberal laws, was 
conquered, and burnt alive by Sabacon, or Sabak I., the king of 
Ethiopia, and thus the founder of an Ethiopian dynasty in 
Egypt. His successor, Sabak II., whom Manetho calls Sebi- 
chds, and the Jews So (Seve), made an alliance with Hoshea, 
king of Samaria, to support him in his refusal of continued 
vassalage to Shalmaneser, or Sargon. The first result of this 
was the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians, with the final de- 
portation of the people, and the substitution of a colony from 
some other part of the Assyrian empire. The next (whether 
as motive or pretext) appears to have been Sargon's invasion 
of Egypt. In Isaiah xx. we find Sargon's general laying siege 
to Ashdod, the most southern of the Philistian fortresses, and 
the key of Egypt (or Assyria, as the case might be) ; as Gaza 
and El-Arish, respectively, were in later times : and in this 
king's own Annals it is said that Ashdod was (as well as Gaza 
and Askelon) at this time subject to Meroe or Ethiopia, and that 
its commandant, named Haleri, fled to Egypt when the fortress 
could no longer hold out. Sargon then probably advanced with 
his main army into Egypt. It was perhaps now* that he de- 
feated the Egyptians in a pitched battle at Rabek, which Colonel 
Rawlinson identifies with On or Heliopolis ; and to the same 
period we may best refer the destruction mentioned by Isaiah's 
cotemporary, Nahum, of the ' populous No- Amnion,' or Thebes, 
6 that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round 
about it, whose rampart was the sea, and her wall was from the 

* Col. Rawlinson seems, indeed, to put tliis battle before the siege of 
Ashdod, though in connection with one of Khazita or Gaza. See his Com- 
mentary and Outline, already quoted. 



192 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



sea : Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite ; 
Put and Lubim w T ere her helpers. Yet she was carried away, 
she went into captivity : her young children also were dashed in 
pieces at the top of all the streets : and they cast lots for her 
honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains.' * 

Sargon says that he received tribute from Pharaoh, king of 
Egypt ; and that most interesting discovery f in Sennacherib's 
palace, of what can hardly be other than the seal of a treaty 
between Sabak and the Assyrian king, gives a literal (though 
by no means the highest) fulfilment of Isaiah's prediction of fu- 
ture amity between Egypt and Assyria : while the invasion of 
Sargon accomplished his threat of the c cruel lord,' in the chap- 
ter before us, and his warning, in the chapter immediately suc- 
ceeding, of the fate which would befall Egypt and Ethiopia both, 
within a short period of the siege of Ashdod, then in progress. 

The name Mizraim, like Asshur, or Moab, is both that of the 
country and of the traditional founder : and here again we 
have Egypt as a person, the distinction being kept up in the 
original by the use of the masculine suffixes where our Ver- 
sion gives the neuter it. The opening words of this prophecy 
represent the Lord, c who maketh the clouds his chariot ' 
(probably here and elsewhere not without allusion to the cloud 
which led the Israelites, and hovered over the Mercy-seat), 
coming into Egypt to stir up civil war throughout the land. 
Egypt was famous for its multitude of gods, its minute po- 
litical and social organisation of castes or tribes (verse 13.), 
and the wisdom of its sages and counsellors. Perhaps Isaiah, 
in his contemptuous mention of all these, and their inability to 
help the country in its anarchy, recognises in them the very 
causes of that anarchy. The multitude of idols, and of here- 
ditary castes, evidently must have been main hinderances to 
national unity, since they supplied an indefinite number of 
separate foci, or ganglions, of social life, instead of the central 
heart and brain of the higher organisation: and the wisdom of 
the priests and the initiated kings would have the same ten- 
dency, since they had made it their exclusive possession, and 
employed it, not for the enlightenment and education of the 



* Nahum, iii. 8— 10. 



f Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, p. 156. 



ISAIAH XIX. 1 — 25.: ANARCHY AND ITS CURE. 193 



people, but as the most effective instrument of the priest- 
craft and statecraft which controlled a population numerous and 
aggregated like herds of cattle, but debased, and therefore 
isolated, as men. 

The realities of anarchy and civil war will confound the 
statesmen and their craft ; they will be utterly at a loss to pro- 
pose means to remedy the evil, or to see what the end will be 
if things are left to themselves ; they will seek equally in vain 
for guidance from their idols and their soothsayers ; and at last 
another reality, the despotic rule of a cruel conqueror and ruler, 
will supersede both them and the anarchy they could not face 
with all their shams. 

The Nile (the sea as it is here and elsewhere called) was the 
source of fertility and life to Egypt, and its failure the certain 
occasion of general drought and famine ; and Isaiah employs its 
failure as the symbol, a real part of the whole which it repre- 
sents, to describe the universality of the national distress. 

In the height of their calamity, they will think, first with 
fear, and then with hope, of the Lord who is thus executing 
His counsels to the confounding of their own; and they will 
turn their anxious looks to that people with whom their own 
nation has from ancient times been made to feel its relation, in 
blessings as well as in judgments, through a Joseph no less 
than a Moses. And then Isaiah describes the deliverance of 
Egypt from its oppressors, and its participation in the faith, 
and consequently in the blessing of Israel, in terms which were 
remarkably fulfilled in after times, again and again, with an 
amplitude which is at once an answer to the notion that he 
wrote after some one of the events, or that certain verses were 
interpolated to agree with some other. There is much doubt 
as to the verbal meaning of verse 18. 6 The city of destruction' 
is the true translation of the original, but its obscurity has led 
to various conjectural emendations, for an account of which, 
with the arguments for or against each, I may refer the reader 
to Alexander or his authorities. He quotes with approbation 
Calvin's explanation, that five-sixths of Egypt shall be saved, 
but the sixth part destroyed : an explanation characteristic of 
the stern reformer, who liked to contemplate judgment as an 
end, and not merely as a means, but which is far less suitable 

o 



194 



HEBKEW POLITICS. 



to the context than that which changes 6 destruction ' for 6 sal- 
vation/ and considers five to be a round number * to express 
6 many.' The interpretation of it as a proper name, Leontopolis, 
or Heliopolis, is contrary, says Gesenius, to the use of the 
word e called,' which Isaiah always appropriates to symbolic 
appellations.! It was not this, but the next verse, which 
Onias referred to in favour of his temple at Leontopolis, and 
therefore the argument for its having been interpolated by him 
seems sufficiently refuted, even if it could be explained how 
the Jews of Palestine accepted such an interpolation from the 
so hated sectarian. The literal coincidences, however, between 
these details and the events, and among others between the 
promise of a e saviour ' and a 6 great one,' and the titles of 
Alexander the Great and Ptolemy the Saviour, are noticeable 
and interesting ; though he must be unobservant of like coin- 
cidences in all history and daily life who is driven by them to 
choose between miracle and forgery. The general idea of 
Isaiah, however we may explain details, is that the true faith of 
Israel will be widely spread through Egypt: the altar and 
the pillar may be rather poetical images, taken from the history 
of the patriarchs J, than attempts to predict or prescribe actual 
mode of worship, though it is not impossible that the prophet 
may have conceived of such helps to their faith being lawful in 
that distant land, though forbidden to the Jews, who were to 
sacrifice on no altar but at Jerusalem. In the main, however, 
he apparently contemplates Jerusalem itself as the actual 
place of worship, when he speaks of Egypt 'serving,' that 
is, worshipping the Lord, with Assyria and Israel : yet we 
must not overlook the freedom from formal restrictions in his 
language, which thus anticipates the time when the true wor- 
shippers should worship the Father in spirit and in truth, and 
neither in this or that mountain, nor in J erusalem ; and still 
less the Catholic spirit which could comprehend not only the 
comparatively friendly Egypt, but also Assyria, the cruellest of 
enemies, in Israel's own covenant of peace and blessing from 
the Lord. 

* As it is in Genesis, xliii. 34., xlv. 22., xlvii. 2. 

f Chap. iv. 3., lxi. 6., lxii. 4. 

I Grotius refers to Joshua, xxii. 10 — 34, 



BACON ON PROPHECY. 



195 



The fulfilment of these promises to Egypt was ample ; first be- 
ginning with the overthrow of Sargon's successor, Sennacherib, 
and the friendly intercourse with Hezekiah in the latter years of 
his reign ; and then extending through successive generations, 
beyond the troubles of the Dodecarchy, the conquest of Nebu- 
chadnezzar, and the mad cruelty of Cambyses. Alexander the 
Great delivered them from the grievous Persian yoke, and he 
and his successors greatly favoured the people and improved the 
country. He settled a great many Jews in Alexandria, giving 
them equal privileges with the Macedonians ; and this Hebrew 
immigration was still farther promoted by Ptolemy Soter, so 
that Philo reckoned that in his time there were a million Jews 
in the country. The temple of Onias, the Septuagint version 
of the Bible, the books of the Apocrypha, the philosophy and 
theology of Philo, indicate not only what these Jews were in 
themselves, but enable us to infer with certainty how great must 
have been their example and influence in humanising the Egyp- 
tians, and bringing them to the knowledge and worship of the 
true God. And still more were these results apparent, still 
more amply was this prophecy fulfilled, when Alexandria became 
one of the great centres of the Christian Church. There are 
other instances as real, but there is hardly one more obvious, of 
the correctness of Lord Bacon's rule that, in these interpreta- 
tions, we must ' allow that latitude which is agreeable and fami- 
liar unto divine prophecies ; being of the nature of their Author, 
with whom a thousand years are but as one day ; and therefore 
are not fulfilled punctually at once, but have springing and 
germinant accomplishment throughout many ages ; though the 
height or fulness of them may refer to some one age.' * 



* Advancement of Learning, book ii. 3. 



196 HEBREW POLITICS. 

A 



CHAPTER XIV. 

SABGON, SHALMANESER, TARTAN. THE SIEGE OF ASHDOD. SHEBNA'S 

-POLICY OF ALLIANCES. ISAIAH'S SYMBOLICAL PROTEST AGAINST IT HE 

WALKS NAKED AND BAREFOOT. ISAIAh's POLICY PROBABLY MORE EXPE- 
DIENT CERTAINLY MORE BEFITTING ISRAEL'S PLACE IN UNIVERSAL 

HISTORY. 

Vitringa maintained the conclusion of Sanctius and Jung- 
mann, that Sargon was another name for Shalmaneser. Colonel 
Rawlinson treats this as now proved, while Dr. Hincks considers 
it to be still doubtful, at least : but they both hold it quite as- 
certained that he is the Sargina of the inscriptions at Khors- 
abad, as well as the builder of that city, the site of which 
retained the name of Sarghun as late as the Arab conquest : 
and the latter interpreter promises us hereafter a detailed ac- 
count from these inscriptions, of the reduction of Ashdod 
on the occasion of which Isaiah here treats in the chapter 
now before us, and of which I have just spoken by antici- 
pation. Tartan is said to be, not a proper name, but the com- 
mon title of the Assyrian commanders in chief.* After he had 
taken Ashdod, it possibly continued in the power of the As- 
syrians till it was besieged, as Herodotus relates (ii. 157.), for 
twenty-nine years by Psammeticus. It is now a little village, 
retaining its old name. 

In the third year of Hezekiah, Hoshea, king of Samaria, 
had brought Shalmaneser's overwhelming power upon him by 
refusing his accustomed tribute, and calling in So, king of 
Egypt, to support him in his rebellion. Yet this was now the 
policy contemplated by the government and people of Hezekiah. 
The vassalage into which Ahaz had brought Judah was no 



LayarcTs Nineveh and Babylon, p. 148, note. 



ISAIAH XX. : THE SIEGE OF ASHDOD. 



197 



doubt intolerable : Isaiah's repeated references to the e op- 
pressors/ 6 the spoilers/ and the c robbers,' indicate what we 
might expect from the character of the Assyrians, — that the 
tribute was almost the whole produce of the country, such as 
has been requisite to buy off the hordes of Huns, Tartars, or 
Mahrattas, of other times : and since the Assyrian armies were 
constantly on the borders of the little kingdom of Judah — 
during the sieges of Samaria, Tyre, Ashdod, and elsewhere — 
probably all payments were occasionally insufficient to protect 
the Jews from the rapacious licence of a soldiery whose royal 
leader could fix 6 three hundred talents of silver, and thirty 
talents of gold,' as the price of amity with Hezekiah, and then 
immediately on receiving payment, march on Jerusalem with 
the avowed determination to ' destroy it utterly,' after deport- 
ing the inhabitants. Any prospect might seem better than the 
existing misery : and if Hoshea's alliance with Sebichos had 
only hastened the ruin of the kingdom of Ephraim, Judah hoped 
for a more successful result from the like policy. We have, 
perhaps, in chapter xviii. 2., an indication that the Ethiopico- 
Egyptian king had himself proposed such an alliance ; and it is 
plain from chapters xxxi. xxxii., that the Jewish government 
made advances on their side ; while, in the chapter before us, 
Isaiah seems to describe the general feeling of his countrymen, 
when he speaks of 6 Ethiopia their expectation, and Egypt 
their glory.' A policy of expediency, in which one state is to 
be played off against another, and perhaps by one weaker than 
either, always seems the height of wisdom to the crafty diplo- 
matists who play the game, and worse than folly to the looker 
on : and such was the policy of Shebna, Hezekiah 's minister,— 
in his own eyes no doubt ( a politician who could circumvent 
God,' * — and such the opinion of it entertained by Isaiah, one of 
whose energetic protests against it we have before us. He, as 
well as his children, was f a sign to the people,' and not only 
like them by his name and presence, but he now appeared — = 
probnbly while the result of the siege of Ashdod was still doubt- 
ful, and the public expectation in Jerusalem at its height — 
naked and barefoot, that is, without the hair garment which, 



* Hamlet, act 5. scene 1. 
o 3 



198 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



girt with a leathern girdle, was the prophet's dress, as it was 
of the Christian ascetics in after times.* He appeared, in 
fact, as the writers of the middle ages would, unconscious of 
homeliness, have expressed it, c in his shirt : ' for this is a usual 
meaning of the phrase, ( naked,' in Hebrew, as in all languages, 
and one which is moreover indicated here by the { barefoot,' 
which would be otherwise superfluous, as well as by the ad- 
ditional description of the captives he figured. The Masoretic 
punctuation joins the c three years ' with the words that follow, 
in which case the sentence may be rendered c a three years' 
sign,' and understood not that Isaiah walked for three years, 
but that the event was to occur in three years : and the 
prediction would thus somewhat correspond in form with that 
in chapter xvi. 14. Vitringa and Lowth suppose that, in fact, 
Isaiah walked three days, e a day for a year ; ' f others consider 
the symbolical act to have been occasional, though repeated 
throughout the three years. There is nothing improbable in 
this last view, it is that most in agreement with the letter of 
the text, and there is an appearance of the chapter being a brief 
account of the three years' preaching (perhaps the time the siege 
was going on), during which Isaiah used to appear as described, 
and speaking to this effect. Even taken thus literally, this 
symbolic act is far less difficult to comprehend than some of 
those of other prophets. But in all cases a part of the difficulty 
arises, no doubt, from our inability to realise adequately the 
habits and feelings of an ancient and eastern people. To those 
of Isaiah's countrymen who were not hardened against all such 
impressions, the sight of the prophet, and the sound of his 
warning voice, in the streets and market-places of Jerusalem, 
while he showed forth the impending fate of their expected 
deliverers, and thus led them to infer their own, would have 
been full of significance. I have noticed before the practice of 
driving the prisoners of war naked and like herds of cattle : 
the word here translated 6 lead away ' is that usually applied to 
leading or driving cattle ; and the monuments of Egypt, as 
well as Assyria, still depict such strings of captives, quite naked, 

* See 2 Kings, i. 8. ; Zech. xiii. 4. ; Matt. iii. 4. Winer compares the 
pallium of the Greek philosophers with the prophet's mantle, 
f Compare Numbers, xiv. 34. ; Ezekiel, iv. 6. 



shebna's scheme of alliances. 



199 



or with merely an apron, and frequently with their hands bound 
with their own hair. One of Belzoni's drawings of tombs at 
Thebes, says Gesenius, exhibits both Ethiopian and Egyptian 
prisoners in this way. 

We see from Isaiah's subsequent denunciations of the Egyp- 
tian alliance, that the ground of them was, that the people of 
Israel should trust in their own Lord and King for deliverance, 
and in no other power whatever. Though he encouraged He- 
zekiah to the boldest defiance and most resolute resistance of 
Sennacherib at the last, there is no indication that he advised 
or approved his first refusal of the tribute which Ahaz had con- 
sented to pay : on the contrary, the whole tenour of the pro- 
phet's discourses is, that the subjection to the Assyrian yoke 
was a needful though harsh discipline for the nation; that the 
Lord would himself effect their deliverance in due time ; and 
that they were to wait patiently till then.* This simple and 
entire trust in the Lord, as the Head of the nation, and of each 
member of it in particular, — as their actual Ruler, and ever- 
present Friend, watching over them every moment with the 
care of a Husband and a Father, — this is the master-light of all 
Isaiah's philosophy, moral and political, and the one lesson which 
in a hundred forms he is continually teaching the people. Whe- 
ther he was right, whether this is indeed the one thing ' which 

* As a modern writer has charged Jeremiah with treachery worthy of 
death, in preaching submission to Nebuchadnezzar, it is worth while to see 
how his conduct looked to one who had opportunity, and was competent, to 
interpret it by the political experience of his own day. Niebuhr, writing 
Jan. 10. 1809, of the abortive desires of Stein and others to throw off the 
yoke of Napoleon, says, " I told you, as I told every one, how indignant I 
felt at the senseless prating of those who talked of desperate resolves as of a 
tragedy. Ever since the peace of Tilsit, my maxims have been those which 
Phocion preached to the Athenians of his age ; and nowhere have I seen, 
among the declaimers on the other side, a Demosthenes, or even a Hy- 
perides, but many a Diseus. To bear our fate with dignity and wisdom, 
that the yoke might be lightened, was my doctrine, and I supported it with 
the advice of the prophet Jeremiah, who spoke and acted very wisely, living 
as he did under King Zedekiah, in the times of Nebuchadnezzar, though he 
would have given different counsel had he lived under Judas Maccabaeus, in 
the times of Antiochus Epiphanes : ' Seek the peace of the city whither I 
have caused you to be carried away captives ; for in the peace thereof shall 
ye have peace.' " — Niebuhr 1 s Life, vol. i. p. 261. 

o 4 



200 



HEBKEW POLITICS. 



makes a nation happy and keeps it so,' the reader must decide 
for himself : I will only point out that to us, judging after the 
event, the good sense and sound practical statesmanship of 
Isaiah's policy, and the folly of that of Shebna and the public 
opinion which supported his government, are alike obvious. It 
was no doubt an admirable policy for the interests of Egypt, 
that Palestine, with its mountain-defiles and strong fortresses, 
should consent to be her northern military frontier, and that 
Hebrew blood and treasure should be expended in maintaining 
the fortified cities of Samaria and Jerusalem, Lachish and Lib- 
nah, against the advance of Assyria. If the invaders overcame 
these obstacles at last, Egypt would meanwhile have gained 
some years of security at no cost to herself, and would be then 
better able to meet a half- exhausted foe; while, if the resistance 
of the Hebrews was successful, they themselves would have been 
so weakened as to be at the mercy of the ally they had been 
serving too well. In no case could Israel be other than a suf- 
ferer : if the contest of the great belligerents could have been 
fought out in some other country than Palestine, there might 
have been a little more plausibility in Shebna's scheme for a 
balance of power, though even then the day of retribution might 
have been expected at last, from friend, if not from foe : but when 
Palestine itself must, in such a case, be ' the cockpit ' of Asia and 
Africa, the one thing which sound policy indicated was, that it 
should, if possible, remain neutral. There was a moment of 
Israel's history (Ewald has finely remarked), when it seemed pos- 
sible that David might have laid the foundations of an empire like 
that of Rome, as there was that Solomon might have led the way 
to the reign of a philosophy as sovereign as that of Greece) but 
the innate energy, the proper life of the nation, rejected these 
temptations to quit its appointed place in universal history; 
and like Rome and Greece, in their appointed spheres, and like 
every other nation worthy the name, it went resolutely for- 
ward, at whatever sacrifice of all its other and conflicting in- 
terests. Now, this appointed place and course was that of wit- 
nessing in its institutions, history, and literature, for what is 
sometimes called c the religious idea,' but which a plain man 
may better name the fact that men stand in a real and actual 
relation to God, and that God is really and actually present 



isaiah's policy the sounder. 



201 



with men to uphold that relation at all times, and to educate 
them through it to know Him, and to show forth His image 
more and more. If, then, the Jews in the time of Isaiah could 
not secure the independence and other political interests of their 
country, without abandoning their right place in the world, they 
w T ould have been bound in duty and reason to sacrifice these, and, 
as Isaiah taught, to cleave to the Lord at all hazards, and leave 
the event to Him. But, in fact, not only was a political neu- 
trality their only sound policy, but they really were very likely 
to have succeeded in maintaining it, if it had been based on a 
national faith and practical piety. It does not need a special 
miracle, a suspension of the ordinary laws of the universe, to 
make true religion, with its fruits of virtue and honesty, the best 
policy, whether for a nation or an individual. The very case is 
already provided for in those laws as originally laid down. His- 
tory and biography attest the fact sufficiently ; though they show 
that the end is constantly effected through so many difficulties, 
or, as St. Paul would say, through so much weakness of the 
flesh, that nothing but the reality of the faith within could have 
supplied the necessary courage for enduring till the end. 



202 



EBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER XV. 

ISAIAH, XXI. I A VISION IN A DEEAM OR TRANCE. BIBLE MEANING OF IN- 
SPIRATION. DIVINATION. ANCIENT ORACLES. SPECIAL POWERS OF 

NATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS. ONE GREECE, ONE SHAKSPEARE. DISCERN- 
MENT OF POLITICAL EFFECTS IN THEIR CAUSES LESS POSSIBLE NOW THAN 

FORMERLY. ' THE DESERT OF THE SEA.' THE PROPHET A WATCHMAN.— 

THE TRIBES OF ARABIA SUBJECTED BY ASSYRIA. 

The school of commentators represented by Professor Alex- 
ander, find, in that part of Isaiah xxi. which relates to Babylon, 
e wonderful coincidences with history, both sacred and profane, 
which could not be ascribed to Isaiah, or to any contemporary 
writer, without conceding the reality of prophetic inspiration.' 
These coincidences are the mention of the Medes and Persians, 
as the conquerors of Babylon ; the night of festivity changed 
into a night of terror, corresponding with the statements of 
Herodotus, Xenophon, and Daniel, that the court was revel- 
ling when Cyrus took the city ; the vivid picture of the equally 
historical surprise of the revellers by the enemy ; the asses and 
camels which Herodotus and Xenophon describe as used for riding 
in the Persian armies, while the latter also represents their ad- 
vancing two by two ; and the breaking of all the idols by a na- 
tion who, Herodotus says, not only thought it unlawful to use 
images, but imputed folly to those who did it. The rationalists 
at first accepted the premises of this argument as unquestion- 
able, but drew the conclusion that the prophecy was, in fact, 
written after the event ; but they now admit that a politician 
or a poet writing shortly before the time could have foreseen 
such of these historical details as they allow to be fairly dis- 
coverable in the text, — just as Gesenius says is the case with 
the coincidences in Jeremiah's prophecies, the genuineness of 



INSPIRATION: ANCIENT ORACLES. 



203 



which he speaks of as undoubted. I have already pointed 
out how far these opponents appear to me to be advocating 
different sides of the same truth, and helping us towards a 
higher view which shall comprehend and reconcile all that is 
really true in both. And I have said all that I have to say on 
the historical and literary facts and arguments of the case. 
But there is one point to which, often as I have adverted to it, 
these words of Dr. Alexander's warn me that I must return, if 
I would sift the whole question of prophecy to the bottom. 

The word 6 inspiration,' in the passage just quoted from this 
learned commentator, is there lowered to a sense in which 
neither the Bible nor the Christian Church employs it * ; and is 
used to designate a power of predicting events, such as the 
heathen oracles and the mediaeval astrologers claimed, and by 
their cotemporaries were believed to exercise. It is commonly 
said that in the latter cases there was fraud or delusion, while 
the Hebrew prophets really possessed the gift : and there can be 
no doubt that the Jews generally, and very little doubt that 
Isaiah and the other prophets themselves, would have maintained 
that they were enabled, on particular occasions, to exercise such 
a gift of prediction ; though the wise and religious among them, 
whether people or teachers, would not have allowed that it was 
in this gift that the reality of prophetic inspiration consisted. 
But conscience, no less than reason, forbids me to deny that the 
Greek and Roman oracles, and the astrologers of the middle 
ages, did utter numerous predictions which were fulfilled with 
no greater mixture of failures than those of the Hebrews, and 
which were of no less social and political importance to those to 
whom they were addressed. Cicero held that the reality of the 
power of divination was proved alike by the universal belief of 
the greatest sages, and the manifest correspondence between the 

* The Prayer-Book (that authoritative manual of a large portion of the 
Christian Church in England) uses the word 'inspiration' in the true sense, 
in the first Collect of the Communion Service, ' Cleanse the thoughts of our 
hearts by the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit ;' and in the Collect for the fifth 
Sunday after Easter, ' That by Thy holy inspiration we may think those 
things that be good :' while the fact that such inspiration is the ordinary, 
habitual state of every member of Christ's Church, is asserted or im- 
plied in every sentence of the Book. 



204 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



predictions and events of the oracle of Delphi in particular.* 
And Mebuhr denies that the merely sceptical arguments solve 
the question f : and his observations suggest the thought whether 
the power did exist, not as a miraculous witness of the true 
faith, but as a human endowment of the earlier ages, like the 
powers of language -making and myth-making, which have been 
already noticed. 

If the reader still thinks that such an insight into the future, and 
such an instinct beyond the limits of that insight, as I here claim 
for Isaiah, are beyond any known powers, intellectual or ima- 
ginative, of the human mind, I would beg him to consider 
that there are many instances in the history of the world of a 
single man appearing with powers unparalleled by those of any 
other; and in like manner each nation, ancient and modern, 
that deserves the name, had or has a special vocation for which 
it has exhibited powers which no other has shown. There has 
been but one Homer, one Socrates, one Raphael, one Shakspeare : 
the greater part even of intellectual and educated men live and 
die without any perceptible trace of the gift which enabled 
Newton to grasp very complicated theorems with intuitive ap- 
prehension ; and Mozart in infancy could compose music with a 
knowledge of the laws of harmony which few grown men could 

* See Coleridge's Lay Salmons, p. 91 . (3rd edit.) ; and Grote's History 
of Greece, ii. 339. Bacon's Advancement of Learning, ii. (Divination.) 

f " These oracles of the ancients were a strange thing. It is easy to say 
it was all an artifice of the priests ; but these priests themselves were a part 
of the people. Besides, such explanations did well enough for the time of 
the French philosophers as they were called; but we want deeper inquiries 
at this day. Why is it they were so long respected by the people ? How 
does it happen that we find them in some shape or other, elsewhere ? Did 
man, in those early periods, stand nearer to nature ? Lieber's Reminiscences 
of .Niehuhr, p. 225. The following passage is in the like tone : — "It seems 
that civilization must have started by some immediate inspiration ; for whence 
comes it, that no tribe, though discovered centuries ago in a savage state, has 
advanced since then, except by some impulse from foreign nations already 
civilized ? The mythology, too, of almost every nation, whose civilization 
dates from remote periods, teaches that a god or goddess descended to 
instruct man in agriculture, the use of iron, and other, elementary arts. I 
hardly can conceive how man could have invented by himself the compli- 
cated process of baking bread, at so early a period as that in which vie find 
him already provided with this indispensable article." Ibid. p. 227. 



ISAIAH XXI. 1,2.: A VISION IN A DREAM. 205 



acquire by any study. There has been one Greece, from which 
the world derives its philosophy and art ; one Rome, to which 
it owes its laws and politics ; and what would the world be now, 
and to the end of time, if there were no England ? And we 
neither deny these facts, nor call them miracles. And before we 
hurry to a conclusion, let us ask ourselves whether the Hebrew 
nation may not have had a vocation of its own, and whether 
Isaiah may not have been a great and typical man in that nation, 
and neither the one nor the other be the less real or the less 
human for all that. It may be added that one characteristic 
difference between ancient and modern nations is that our social 
relations are far more complicated, — the intricate results of so 
many more causes than were at work in the ancient world. Con- 
sequently an intuitive discernment of causes and effects was 
more possible then than now, for philosophers tell us that every 
event could be certainly predicted if we knew all the causes 
that are at work to produce it, seeing that like effects always 
come of like causes. 

6 The burden of the desert of the sea.' This enigmatical name 
for Babylon, was no doubt suggested by the actual character of 
the country in which the city stood. It was an endless breadth 
or succession of undulations ' like the sea,' without any culti- 
tivation or even any tree : low, level, and full of great 
marshes; and which used to be overflowed by the Euphrates, 
till the whole plain became a sea, before the river was banked 
in by Semiramis, as Herodotus says.* But it is not improbable 
that the prophet alludes also to the social and spiritual desert 
which Babylon was to the nations over which its authority ex- 
tended, and especially to the captive Israelite : and perhaps to 
the multitude of the armies which it poured forth like the 
waters of the sea. So Ezekiel tells the Jews that they shall be 
led by God into 6 the wilderness of the people,' as their fathers 
were into the wilderness of the land of Egypt, contrasting the 
human with the natural wilderness — alike devoid of true life 
and order. And St. J ohn, in the Apocalypse, adopts the same 
imagery in describing Babylon, the dramatic representative of 
Rome : ( I will show thee the judgment of the great whore 



* Herod, i. 184.; Grote's Hist, of Greece, ix. 43. 



206 



IIEBEEW POLITICS. 



that sitteth upon many waters So he carried me away in 

the spirit into the wilderness And he saith unto me, The 

waters which thou saw est are peoples, and multitudes, and na- 
tions, and tongues After these things I saw another 

angel, and he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Baby- 
lon is fallen, is fallen.' 

This prophecy has more the character of a vision than any 
other in the book, excepting that in the sixth chapter. It seems 
to indicate that the writer had been in a state of trance, perhaps 
somewhat like that which Coleridge describes in the introduction 
to his Kitbla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream, where he says 
he c continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least 
of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid 
confidence that he could not have composed less than from two 
to three hundred lines ; if that, indeed, can be called composition 
in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a 
parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without 
any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he ap- 
peared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, 
and taking his pen, paper, and ink, instantly and eagerly wrote 
down the lines,' which he there gives, but of which the current 
was abruptly cut off. We may get some light too from our 
ordinary experience in dreams, here as on chapter vi. 

The unity of the whole is not less striking than the vividness 
of its parts ; but it is a unity derived from the imagination, and 
not from the logical faculty ; and it overleaps the bonds of time 
and space, and brings remote objects together, just as the ima- 
gination of the dreamer does, without any sense of incongruity. 

6 It cometh : ' — a man in a dream would not ask what ; — 
he simply feels that something terrible, and from a terrible land, 
is sweeping over the scene, like one of the whirlwinds which 
still, as then, drive furiously up from the southern deserts.* 
Then he sees that there is reason enough for this terror, for the 
land —his own land — is filled with spoilers, robbing by fraud 
or violence : just what, in fact, Isaiah and his countrymen ex- 
perienced as the condition of their daily existence during many 
years of his life. 

* See Layard's account of the these * shergis, or burning winds from the 
south;' Nineveh and Bah/Ion, p. 364. where he quotes this verse of Isaiah. 



ISAIAH XXI. 3 — 10. : THE POLITICAL WATCHMAN. 207 



He recognises at once the i terrible land,' e the desert of the 
sea/ from which the evil has come : he calls Elam and Media 
to ( go up and besiege,' and in a moment all the sighing of the 
oppressed has ceased. 

By a new act of the imagination, he identifies himself with 
the besieged city ; and experiences all the sensations of extreme 
terror, as he sees, in an instant of time, the preparations for a 
feast, and the setting the watch, the actual feasting, and the 
call to arms without and within the walls ; and knows at once, 
as an inhabitant of the city, what his doom is. 

Then he half returns to the consciousness that he is Isaiah, a 
prophet in Jerusalem, and no Babylonian, and explains how 
this catastrophe had been revealed to him. He is still over- 
mastered by his imagination, but it takes a new direction. He 
was accustomed to wait whole days and nights in fasting, medi- 
tation, and prayer, when seeking to know the mind of the Lokd ; 
and these special acts were but the outward and occasional ex- 
pressions of a life of spiritual waiting and watching, — of patient 
meditation upon God's word and works, and no less patient wait- 
ing to see the political events of his own day, however dark 
and unpromising, open out into results according with that word 
and those works in the old times. The politics of his nation 
were involved in all the prophet's hopes and prayers ; and as the 
watchman looks from the watchtower in time of war, so he stood 
on the watchtower of divinely illuminated reason, and looked 
out into the world, — taking a comprehensive view of all that 
was passing or coming there; discerning the significance and 
importance of each event ; and accordingly either warning the 
nation, for whom he kept guard, of approaching evil, or comfort- 
ing them with the announcement of deliverance.* And thus his 
prophetic office and faculty now represent themselves to him, 
and he describes them, as his setting a watchman, by command 
of the Lokd, to watch and report what he sees. This watch- 
man — no other than the projected form of the prophet himself 
— stands on an ideal watchtower, and sees a host of chariots, 
horses, asses, camels, approaching ; and, after listening for a mo- 

* Compare Isaiah, lii. 8., lvi. 10. ; Jeremiah, \i. 17. ; Ezekiel, xxxiii. 2. ; 
Ilabak. ii. 1. 



208 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ment with the eagerness of a watchful sentry, he gives the alarm 
in the phrase familiar to the Hebrew shepherd — c A lion I ' 
And he then reports in detail that he had watched continually 
night and day, for many days, when at last he saw the invading 
army, which the prophet, in the co-instantaneousness of all the 
parts of a vision, was already become aware of, before he 
— the other self — could report it. 6 Lord ' is the title ap- 
propriated to God, and not equivalent to * Sir ' as our ver- 
sion implies; which heightens, without at all confusing, the 
visionary character of the whole, by making the prophet recog- 
nise his own individuality, and the fact that he himself is the 
watchman, and set there by the Lord. The watchman speaks 
again after an interval, and reports that all is over, — Babylon 
and her gods are fallen. The watchman may be conceived as at 
first standing on the walls of Babylon, and then transferred in 
a moment of time to Jerusalem ; but it is simpler to leave the 
ideal indefiniteness of the text. 

The prophet utters a half ironical, half compassionate excla- 
mation, on the fate of his country's enemy ; and concludes by 
declaring, both to that enemy and to his own countrymen, that 
what he has thus declared he has heard from the Lord of hosts, 
the God of Israel. 

There are different opinions as to the true rendering of details. 
Some suppose verses 1. and 2. to describe the sufferings of Ba- 
bylon on the invasion of the Medes and Persians ; Ewald and 
Alexander say it is more correct to read, in verses 7. and 8., 6 And 
should he see ... let him hearken ; ' some understand, * he 
cried like a lion for loudness ; ' and some refer the ( threshing ' 
to Israel. On the last two renderings I would notice that I have 
followed Jeremiah's apparent mode of understanding them*, 
which also seems to me the more graphic. 

The genuineness of the rest of the chapter is not disputed ; 
but modern criticism has not decided whether the two ( Bur- 
dens' of s Dumah ' and f Arabia' are separate prophecies, or 
parts of one prophecy, in the margin of which the two titles 
would then stand: nor whether Dumah is the Arab tribe of 
Dumah (descended from Ishmaelf, and having perhaps given 

* Chapter 1. 44., li. 33. With the latter compare Micah, iv. 12, 13. 
f Genesis, xxv. 14. ; 1 Chron. i. 30. 



ISAIATI XXI. 11 — 17: THE TRIBES OF ARABIA. 



209 



its name to the Dumah Eljandel still found on the confines of 
Arabia and Syria), or an enigmatical name for Edour, as the 
Septuagint supposes, and as the mention of Seir just after seems 
to indicate, though the latter may be taken as referring only to 
the tract of desert and mountain in that quarter. To which 
we, who accept the prophecy against Babylon as also written by 
Isaiah, have to add the question whether both, or the former of 
these, should be taken as its continuation. And, lastly, what is 
the purport of these seven verses ? 

The image of the watchman suggests a connection between 
the first and second portions; and the names Dumah, Seir, 
Arabia, Dedanim, Tenia, and Kedar, between the second and 
third. And if we take the text as it stands, the general sense 
will apparently be, that at the time when Judah was actually 
suffering the oppressions of the e treacherous dealer,' and the 
6 spoiler,' but was promised deliverance by Isaiah, he is applied 
to by the Arab tribes, whose caravans conducted through Arabia 
the course of a commerce which even then might exchange the 
tin of Britain with the ivory of India : they inquire whether 
they may hope to escape the great robber, and the prophet 
replies, after a hesitation which seems half contemptuous, half 
indicative of the obscurity in which the future was involved to 
him, that they will not escape. Gesenius observes that, though 
the voice calling to the watchman out of Seir may without im- 
probability be taken merely as a poetic image, it is also quite 
probable that it refers to an actual inquiry. It was not less 
likely that the neighbouring nations should consult a prophet of 
the Lord, than that Balak should apply to Balaam, Ahaziah 
consult Baal-zebub the god of Ekron, or Croesus the oracle of 
Delphi. 

The tribes who traversed, as they still traverse, the deserts of 
Arabia and Syria, with their flocks and herds, with trade- cara- 
vans, or on plundering forays, are chiefly traced, in the records 
of Genesis, to Abraham, through Hagar and Keturah, — Ne- 
baioth, Dedan, and Tema as sons of Ishmael, and Kedar as 
the grandson of Keturah ; but some also to Joktan and to Cush. 
We find these Arabs — Midianites, Amalekites, and children of 
the east — invading Israel, in the time of the Judges ; paying- 
tribute to Jehoshaphat and Uzziah ; and having one of their 

p 



210 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



settlements taken possession of by the Simeonites in tlie reign of 
Hezekiah, after they had exterminated the tribe, — an event 
which may possibly be connected with the present prophecy.* 
Dedan and Tema are elsewhere f connected with each other, 
and with Edom and other northern tribes of Arabia : Tema is 
mentioned by Ptolemy ; and Kedar by Pliny, by Stephanus of 
Byzantium, and by Theodoret, who says that in his time the 
Kedranites pastured their flocks in the province of Babylon : 
and Bochart traces to Dedan, the traders in the ivory and ebony 
of India, the name of Daden, an island in the Persian Gulf ; 
while Seetzen found Tema in the caravan-route between Mecca 
and Damascus. In Genesis, xxxvii., and Job, vi. 19., we have 
the caravans mentioned, and in Ezekiel, xxvii., an ample account 
of the trade which they carried on ; while Kedar, known by its 
tents of black hair- cloth, and rich in the flocks which formed its 
staple commerce, seems to have been distinguished from these 
purely trading tribes, by greater estrangement from civilised 
intercourse and courtesy, as might have been expected from 
their different habits. J Colonel Rawlinson finds the names of 
Tehaman (Teman), Damun, Kidar (Kedar), Khagarin (Ha- 
garenes), and Nabaut (Nebaioth), in a list of 6 the Aramaean 
tribes who lined the Tigris and Euphrates,' subjugated by Sar- 
gina, and from whom he carried off 6 an enormous booty ' of 
men, women, and cattle, of which the kinds and numbers are 
specified. And among the countries whose kings brought c their 
accustomed tribute' to Sennacherib, the same learned inves- 
tigator reads that of Huduma, or Edom. § 

* Judges, vi. 3.; 2 Chron. xvii. 11., xxvi. 7.; 1 Chron. iv. 39. 43. 
f Jeremiah, xxv. 23., xlix. 7, 8. ; Ezek. xxv. 13. 

| Song of Solomon, i. 5.; Isaiah, xlii. 11., lx. 7.; Ezek. xxvii. 21.; 
Psalm cxx. 5. ; Jeremiah, ii. 10. 
§ Outline, pp. 19. 22. 



POLITICAL PARTIES IN IIEZEKIAITS REIGN. 



211 



CHAPTER XVI. 

ISAIAH XXII. : POLITICAL PARTIES AT JERUSALEM. SHEBNA AND THE 

MAJORITY. ELIAKIM AND THE MINORITY. ISAIAH's ATTACK ON SHEBNA. 

PREPARATIONS FOR THE SIEGE. — TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM. 

SITE OF SION. SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE AND KING. — FALL OF SHEBNA. 

SUFFERINGS OF MODERN NATIONS FROM INVASION. MORAL AND RE- 
LIGIOUS RESULTS. PRUSSIA. — SWITZERLAND. 

To an ordinary Englishman, accustomed all his life to hear 
denunciations of the policy of the government followed by an- 
ticipations of the downfal of its author, and of the benefits 
which the country must expect from the new policy of his 
successor in the ministry, it may seem superfluous to examine 
seriously the notion that the twenty-second chapter of Isaiah 
consists of two separate prophecies, or that its unity needs 
proving by such arguments as he will find in the commentators. 

The date of the prophecy is evidently the fourteenth year of 
Hezekiah; and a comparison of the accounts in the books of 
Kings and Chronicles with the discourse before us, enables us, 
at the end of twenty-five centuries, to see the very form and 
pressure of those ancient times. There is indeed a difficulty 
from that peculiarity of Hebrew grammar noticed before, which 
permits an interchange of the past and future tenses of the 
verb in such a way as to make it a matter of discussion with 
translators which of the two, or whether the present tense in- 
stead of either, will best express the force of the original. The 
verbs in the description of the preparation for the siege, with 
all its circumstances, are translated by Gesenius and others 
as presents, — they understanding them to describe the facts as 
Isaiah sees them in his mind's eye, and just before their actual 
occurrence. No doubt this is the true view in the main, and 
we may be well content with it, if the slight haze which it 
leaves over certain details of the picture cannot be dispelled by 

p 2 



212 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



any modern insight : but it is obvious that there is a haze. The 
alarm of the city and its reckless jollity, the repairs of the forti- 
fications and the array of the enemy in the neighbouring valleys, 
imply some lapse of time during their course ; and as the whole 
conditions of ancient and Eastern life require us to believe that 
this prophecy was spoken, and not first published in writing as 
it might be now, the question presents itself whether any Hebrew 
scholarship can fix the exact point of time at which it was spoken, 
and so distinguish the facts which the prophet saw with his 
bodily eye from those present to him in vision. No such dis- 
tinction may be possible now; the master- artist himself may 
have obliterated any original differences between the actual and 
the ideal objects of his discourse ; but thus much at least we 
may see, — that the actual facts, to which Isaiah could at the 
moment point with his hand, were such as to enable his hearers 
to follow him in filling up the blank portions of the canvas. If 
when he spoke they could see people on the housetops looking 
wistfully in the direction of Lachish, at the siege of which the 
Assyrian army was at the moment lying, it would seem hardly 
a figure of speech to tell them that the valleys of Hinnom and 
liephaim, beyond which their eyesight might not carry them, 
were full of Persian cavalry, though in fact they saw nothing 
but green corn waving, nor recognised as yet any sign of an 
enemy along the mile or two of the western highway which 
might be visible from Jerusalem : — for they well knew that 
less than twenty-five miles of that road would take them 
into the heart of Sennacherib's camp. And so of the rest. 
And if the present and the future of that day have long become 
one ideal past to us, the whole harmonious picture is not the 
less true to the life, — true to the old Hebrew life which ac- 
tually was then and there, and which is still here for us to see ; 
and true no less to the human life of our own and every other 
day. 

Let us then look at the picture as it is, after noticing its 
significant and somewhat enigmatical title, analogous to that of 
the previous prophecy against Babylon. It is apparently taken 
— we need not doubt by Isaiah himself — from the expression 
in verse 5., which seems to be itself suggested by the fact that 
it is in vision that the prophet sees the trouble and spoiling of 



SHEBNA AND THE MAJORITY. 



213 



the city which to his outward eye was at the moment showing 
signs of self-confidence. Titles stand first, hut then, as now, 
were written last, to designate the subject written of; and this 
prophecy is a vision of the political state and prospects of 
the city which stood in the midst of the valleys of Judah, and 
of the political party and minister who ruled the city at that 
time. Perhaps the thought that this city was the centre and 
source of all prophetic vision, — that c out of Zion should go 
forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,' at all 
times and for all peoples, — may have added to Isaiah's sense 
of the propriety of the present title; but the other is more likely 
to have first suggested it. 

Hezekiah had from the beginning of his reign given proof of 
his faith in the Lord, as the King whose viceroy he was ; but 
we can see that he had inherited something of the weakness of 
his father's character, along with an authority greatly controlled 
by the nobles, and by what we now call a bureaucracy, or go- 
vernment by narrow and worldly-minded officials, who, though 
unable to take any far-seeing or comprehensive views of the 
interests of the country, were too firmly seated in power to be 
dislodged. At the head of these was Shebna, of whom it has 
been conjectured, from his father's name never being mentioned 
(as was usual, and as we find done in the case of his fellow- 
ministers*), and from his being engaged in making a family 
sepulchre, that he was a man of obscure origin ; while his name, 
which does not seem to be Hebrew, and by which no one else 
is called in the Bible, has been supposed to indicate that he was 
a foreigner. It was by the advice of Shebna, or of the party of 
which he was now the head, that Hezekiah took the false step 
of refusing the tribute to Assyria, which Ahaz had pledged his 
kingdom to, and of looking to Egypt for support in this revolt. 
The kingdom of Israel had done the like, and was annihilated ; 
Ashdod had since fallen; the fortified cities of Judah were 
meeting the same fate, one after another ; while the Assyrian 
armies were encamped in the south-west of Judah, apparently 
on the road to Egypt, but expecting and expected to swallow 
up the little Jewish kingdom easily by the way : and Hezekiah 



* 2 Kings, xviii. 18. 
p 3 



214 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



now endeavoured to deprecate Sennacherib's vengeance by 
sending to him all the gold and silver he could collect, stripping 
the Temple of the treasures and ornaments with which, during 
the previous years of his reign, it had been his glory to have 
made good the like act of his father Ahaz. Whether out of 
sheer treachery, or because he had reason to question the sin- 
cerity of Hezekiah's submission (for the communications between 
Judah and Egypt may have been continued notwithstanding), 
Sennacherib took the money, and immediately sent Tartan, 
liabsaris, and Rab-shakeh to Jerusalem, with a powerful detach- 
ment from the main army with which he was himself besieging 
Lachish, an important fortress about twenty-five miles south- 
west of the capital. The Assyrian generals, however, found the 
city prepared against a surprise, and the courage of the king 
and people too high to yield to their persuasions or threats ; and 
the enterprise failed, only to be followed by the overthrow of 
the main army itself. 

When Rab-shakeh and the enemy's force actually arrived 
under the walls, the political power had passed from the hands 
of Shebna to Eliakim, as Isaiah had foretold : not, however, by 
a literal fulfilment of the prophet's vehement denunciations ; but 
by the former minister being reduced from the first office of 
lord high treasurer, or lord steward, to that of secretary. * He 
may have had business talents too useful, or his influence may 
have been still too great, to permit that complete dismissal which 
the single-minded prophet, who did not consider it his duty to 
balance and reconcile conflicting interests and expediencies, 
thought, and no doubt rightly, was the moral desert of his 
character and acts. Probably this very attack on the minister, 
which reminds one of the words by which Cicero drove out 
Catiline when too strong to be attacked by more material 
weapons, may have given the last blow to Shebna's power : he 
had been hitherto supported by that selfish and time-serving 
majority of nobles, priests, and people, whom Isaiah (like his 
cotemporaries) is always denouncing, and which was too strong 
for Hezekiah and the minority of God-fearing men to over- 
throw, till the present time, when indications that their policy 



* 2 Kings, xviii. 18. 



ELIAKIM AND THE MINORITY. 



215 



was about to bring utter ruin on the state, will have made it 
suddenly and universally unpopular. The political power of 
the nobles, the influence of the priesthood and the prophets 
both with kings and people, and the extent to which these 
balanced each other and limited the regal authority, are dis- 
cernible throughout the Hebrew history. David was for many 
years unable to dismiss Joab his commander in chief, though 
his character and acts were most repugnant to him ; 6 the sons 
of Zeruiah were too strong for him ; ' and on his death-bed he 
advised Solomon not to lose, through any scruple, an oppor- 
tunity for breaking the bondage, if such were offered him by 
any new delinquency. Eehoboam's insolence to his nobles cost 
him the greater part of his kingdom. The whole policy, eccle- 
siastical and civil, of Joash was changed by the influence of the 
nobles on the death of Jehoiada, the high priest. Isaiah and 
his cotemporaries * describe the wealth and the rapacity, which 
imply political power, of the aristocracy : and in Jeremiah's 
narrative f we see that Zedekiah might well complain that i the 
king was not he who could do anything against them.' And 
the independence and courage of the prophets, and the manner 
in which they awakened a public opinion in favour of truth, 
and justice, and the fear of the Lord, in the face of a 
persecution which often ended in their death, is not less no- 
ticeable. We cannot decide how far Hezekiah might have pro- 
tected Isaiah at this time from direct violence ; but the prophet, 
who not only openly denounced the policy of Shebna and the 
other 6 scornful men who ruled this people in Jerusalem,' but 
traced its origin to their irreligion, selfishness, luxury, and op- 
pression of the poor, and declared that God was about to bring 
them to speedy judgment for these things, must have been a 
brave man ; for he would know it to be too probable that, if 
matters came to issue between him and his opponents, e the king 
was not he who could do anything against them.' 

Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, was no doubt already designated 
by Hezekiah and the God-fearing minority, as the proper suc- 
cessor of Shebna : and Isaiah's prediction that he would be a 

* Amos, vi. 1 — 7. ; Micah, iii. 1 — 3. 
f Jeremiah, xxxvii. 15., xxxviii. 5. 
p 4 



216 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of 
Judah, implies that Shebna's character and acts were of the un- 
paternal kind which we might infer from the previous censure 
on his pride and luxury, coupled with the like censures on his 
cotemporarics : — those senators and princes who joined house 
to house and field to field, while they ground the faces of the 
poor, and justified the wicked for reward; who called evil good, 
and put bitter for sweet ; and were prudent in their own sight, 
but regarded not the work of the Lord, nor considered the 
operation of his hands.* 

This prophecy, then, was delivered just before the fall of 
Shebna, and when the open country of Judah, and some of its 
fortified cities, were in possession of the Assyrians, and they 
daily expected under the walls of Jerusalem, which was crowded 
with fugitives from the country round. 

If the latter half of verse 2. is to be taken Avith the former, 
which speaks of the city as still full of the bustle of peaceful 
life, it may imply that as yet they have seen no deaths, but of 
those who have died in their beds : if it is to be taken with 
verse 3., as a part of the picture of impending calamity, it may 
refer to deaths by famine, and by the pestilence which attacked 
the city crowded with fugitives from the open country, and of 
which Hezekiah himself had nearly died. Yerse 3. describes 
the captivity of both princes and people, in the day in which the 
enemy would break down the walls, and the cries of the in- 
habitants reach to the mountains. There would have been some 
anticipation of these calamities, in the case of the cities of Judah 
already taken by the Assyrians, and the reports of which w T ould 
have been known in Jersalem: nay, Sennacherib's own account 
says, — 6 Because Hezekiah still continued to refuse to pay me 
homage, I attacked and carried off the whole population, fixed 
and nomade, which dwelled around Jerusalem, with 30 talents 
of gold and 800 talents of silver, the accumulated wealth of the 
nobles of Hezekiah's court, and of their daughters, with the 
officers of his palace, men slaves and women slaves. I returned 
to Nineveh, and I accounted this spoil for the tribute he refused 
to pay me.f' 

* See their description at length in Chap. v. and elsewhere. 

| Rawlinson's Outline, p. 23. The passage is in continuation of that 



To face page 217. 




SKETCH-MAP OF JERUSALEM. 



ISAIAH, XXII. 1 — 11.: PREPARATIONS FOR THE SIEGE. 217 



Elam, as I have already said, includes the provinces of Media 
and Persia, at this time dependent on Assyria, and supplying 
Sennacherib with their famous bowmen. Kir *, as is now gene- 
rally agreed, is the region between the Caucasus and the Cas- 
pian, which is marked by the names of the river Cyrus and the 
province Georgia : though it has been suggested that it may 
have been that tract of Southern Media where Ptolemy men- 
tions Curene and Carina. 

Verse 8. describes the alarm and indignation of Judah when, 
by the taking of her fortresses, and the appearance of an army 
under the walls of her capital, she is, both in the military and 
the moral sense of the word, dismantled. It was the grossest 
insult to tear the veil from the daughter of Zion ; but now it was 
more than an insult, for it revealed to her the presence and the 
power of her oppressor. 

Their eyes open to their danger, and they look to the arms 
in the arsenal, which took its name from having been built by 
Solomon of timber from Lebanon : they survey the walls of the 
citadel, commonly called the ( city of David,' and select houses 
to be pulled down for materials to repair the walls with : and 
they secure water for the inhabitants, and cut it off from the 
enemy, by stopping or concealing the sources of the springs 
which they have first conducted into reservoirs within the city. 

In order to make these details clearer, let us examine them, 
with the help of the accompanying sketch-map. Towards the 
south-east part of that ridge of rugged, limestone, table-land, 
which, with a breadth of from twenty to twenty-five geogra- 
phical miles, forms the back-bone of southern Palestine, there 
juts out a broad and elevated promontory, enclosed on the east, 
south, and south-west by deep ravines ; while on the north and 
north-west it slopes more gently back into the main table-land. 
These ravines are the Yalleys of Kidron and Ben-Hinnom, and 
the promontory is the site of Jerusalem. f The promontory 
itself consists of several lesser hills and undulations, of which the 
original, and even successive, levels must have been indefinitely 

quoted above, p. 172. The version of Dr. Hincks reads 'his sons and 
daughters' instead of ' the officers of his palace.' 

* 2 Kings, xvi. 9. ; Amos, i. 5. 

f Robinson's Biblical Researches^ vol. i. p. 380 ff. 



218 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



altered by the quarry ings and abrasions, and the accumulations 
of earth and rubbish, of ages ; just as has been the case with the 
hills of Rome, or of London. And these hills in Jerusalem are 
still marked out by a main ravine, or depression, which crosses 
the whole city from north to south, and divides it into two un- 
equal portions: and then by other lesser depressions, which run 
in the transverse direction, and again divide the western, which 
is the broader portion of the ground, into two hills commonly 
called Acra and Zion ; and the eastern into others named Be- 
zetha, Moriah, and Ophel. I say commonly called Zion ; for all 
Christian and local traditions, from the time of Constantine to 
the present day, give this name to the south-western hill. But 
as no biblical or local knowledge has made it possible to recon- 
cile this position of Zion with the various scriptural notices, 
Mr. Fergusson has returned to the uniform declaration of the 
Talmudical writers, that Zion was on the north side of the 
Temple ; and has shown that, by assigning this position to it, he 
can clear up all, or almost all, the hitherto inexplicable diffi- 
culties, and give us a thoroughly coherent topography of the 
Jerusalem of the Old (and also of the New) Testament.* 
Further local investigations, in the light of this view, and for 
the purpose of testing it, will no doubt ere long set the point at 
rest ; and such investigations are now actually in progress. I 
here assume Mr. Fergusson's to be the true, as it is the only 
intelligible, topography; and with the help of his map (sub- 
stantially followed in my sketch) point out the localities which 
would then correspond with the narrative before us. The city 
of Jerusalem, properly so called, was distinct from the city of 
Zion, or of David. The former was the old city of the Jebu- 
sites, and its site the western portion of ground which contains 
the hills of Acra and the falsely named Zion : the latter was a 
new city which David and Solomon built on the eastern side of 
the ravine, and which, when complete, included the citadel of 
David, on the northern brow of the true Zion, the Temple im- 
mediately to the south, and the Castle of Ophel to the south of 
that again. The citadel of David, or ( Strong-hold of Zion,' 
will thus have been in the same place in which, in successive 

* An Essay on the Ancient Topography of Jerusalem, by James Fergusson, 
F.E..A.S. 1847. 



TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM. 



219 



periods, we find the citadel of the Maccabees and of the Romans, 
under the names of Bethzur and Antonia. It is to be supposed 
that the military considerations which approved the site in the 
last cases, would have done so in the first ; and, if a civilian 
may hazard an opinion, it was on the north, and not on the 
south, that the main fortress was required, in order to protect the 
north-western side of the city, which w^as weak from the nature 
of the ground. Each of these cities, of Jerusalem and of Zion, 
would have its own wall ; and their means of communication 
across the ravine which separated them, was apparently by ( the 
stairs that went down from the city of David,' as in after times by 
a bridge, of which there are still remains. These, then, are i the 
Two Walls,' between which Hezekiah made a ditch or aqueduct ; 
and by a gate between which Zedekiah fled, through the 6 king's 
garden,' which was at the south end of the ravine. Before 
Hezekiah's preparations for the siege, the waters of ' the upper 
water-course of Gihon ' (which is the water-head of Kidron, and 
not the Gihon of modern maps), and 6 all the fountains without 
the city,' among w T hich was perhaps that of Siloah, overflowed 
into and formed ( the brook which ran through the midst of the 
land,' down its natural channel of the Valley of Kidron ; but 
now they were conducted, by extensive engineering operations, 
for which the Jewish nobles helped to provide the great number 
of workmen required, and the fame of w T hich was known to 
later times *, ( straight down to the west side of the city of 
David,' that is, between the c Two Walls.' There they seem 
to have been collected in a reservoir (made the easier in a 
ravine) which thus became a substitute for ( the old pool,' which 
lay without the fortifications ; and then the king stopped, that is, 
buried in such a way as effectually to conceal, the fountains or 
sources themselves. The subterraneous channels of Siloah, 
already noticed, were probably among these works ; probably 
too, before this diversion of its perennial sources, the 6 brook 
Kidron' was itself perennial, instead of the mere winter torrent 
it is now. Hezekiah, lastly, seems to have built a w r all across 
the northern opening of the ravine, where it widens into less 

* " He [Hezekiah] fortified bis city, and brought in water into the midst 
thereof : he digged the hard rock with iron, and made wells for waters." — 
jEcclus. xlviii. 17. 



220 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



dcfencible ground; and which was perhaps rebuilt by Mauasseh, 
and then described as e a wall without the city of David, on th 
west side of Gihon, in the valley.' This was the weakest part 
of the whole ground,, as I have before observed ; and the name of 
the ( camp of the Assyrians/ still surviving in the time of Jose- 
ph us, probably indicates that Rab-shakeh posted himself here : 
a tradition from Nebuchadnezzar's siege would have been more 
likely to give the name of ( Chaldeans ;' but the fact that Titus 
encamped on the same spot, shows it was the proper place for 
besiegers in any age. 

In the account which the Book of Chronicles gives of these 
same preparations for standing a siege, it is related that Ileze- 
kiah f gathered the people together to him in the street of the 
gate of the city, and spake comfortably to them, saying, Be 
strong and courageous, be not afraid nor dismayed for the king 
of Assyria, nor for all the multitude that is with him ; for there 
be more with us than with him ; with him is an arm of flesh, 
but with us is the Lord our God to help us, and to fight our 
battles. And the people rested themselves upon the words of 
Hezekiah kino; of Judah.' This was the rischt language for the 
king to use ; and the response of the people was no doubt as 
sincere as loyal and enthusiastic : and their earnestness was 
deep enough to carry them through the impending crisis. But 
deeper than that it was not. Isaiah was at the very same time 
declaring that the people were looking to the approach of the 
enemy, and to the efficiency of their preparations for defence ; 
but not to Him who had designed and done all this, both bring- 
ing the Assyrian on them to punish their sins, and protecting 
them from being quite destroyed by him : and though the pro- 
phet's preaching might seem not only more gloomy, but less 
true than the king's cheerful harangue, yet the event — the out- 
ward progress of national corruption and degeneracy without 
any real reformation — justified the former. He did not forget 
nor omit to assert, at the proper time, that the Lord had re- 
served to Himself a c remnant : ' it was his unceasing aim to 
confirm and increase that remnant by his exhortations and warn- 
ings : but he knew that the faith which his Lord required was 
not that facile enthusiasm which, alternating with panic, swayed 
for the time the assemblies in the ( street of the gate of the city. 



ISAIAH, XXII. 12 — 22.: SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE. 221 



Those critics who, for whatever reasons, see no necessity for 
assuming a literal accomplishment of the threats against Shebna, 
have hitherto been well content to accept, as its sufficient fulfil- 
ment, the change of offices found (as we have just noticed) in 
the Bible history of the time : but the mention in Sennacherib's 
Annals — quoted above — of i officers of Hezekiah's palace ' 
having been then carried to Nineveh, suggests the curious and 
interesting question, whether, after all, there may not have been 
some correspondence between the facts, and the rabbinical tra- 
ditions that Shebna was carried off by Sennacherib. One of 
these traditions says that he was seized by Sennacherib when 
sent on an embassy by Hezekiah ; and another, that he fled to 
the Assyrians after an unsuccessful conspiracy to deliver the 
city to them. 

The vehement hyperbole of these threatenings against the 
people, if we now hesitate to add those against Shebna, re- 
minds one of the lan^uao-e of Luther or of Burke : and when 
contrasted with the actual events, throws much light on the ex- 
ternal and accidental characteristics of Hebrew prophecy. It is 
quite probable that the i What hast thou here, and whom hast 
thou here,' was actually addressed to Shebna, face to face, and 
within sight of his new sepulchre : and if we follow the topo- 
grapher quoted above, we shall believe that the J ewish forum, 
in which Isaiah was likely enough to have delivered the earlier 
part of this harangue, was in the city of Sion, and, therefore, 
close upon the city burying-grounds, which were just without 
the wall, and the more honourable sepulchres in which were ac- 
tually hewn out in the north and east faces of Sion itself. The 
mention of the height of Shebna's new tomb, is supposed to in- 
dicate his extreme pretension to pomp and dignity, as the reader 
will see more at large in Lowth's note. The ancients, not ex- 
cepting the Jews, attached much more importance than we do to 
every thing connected with the burial of the dead, because they 
were so much less able to distinguish the human person from 
the earthly body, or to apprehend the substantial reality of the 
former apart from the latter. Our burials symbolise, and ex- 
press our faith in, immortality and a resurrection ; but the Jews 
shared more or less the common feeling of antiquity, that there 
was some real connection between a man's due obsequies and 



222 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



his state after death. Still their faith, though obscure, was in 
the main spiritual and elevating, when held as it was by David, 
Hezekiah, or Job. But the worldly and sense-bound man then, 
as, indeed, he does now, contemplated the costly preparations 
for his burial, and for the preservation of his embalmed and en- 
tombed body, as the last possible act of regard for that sensual 
existence which he alone cared for. It was but the consistent 
maintenance to the last of his sensual creed — c Let us eat and 
drink, for to-morrow we die.' 

On verse 23. I would suggest that it will be better English, 
if we read 6 glorious support ' instead of f glorious throne ' or 
f seat.' It is a less liberty than that of rendering e a horn, the 
son of oil,' by e a very fruitful hill ; ' *and, as in that case, it gives 
the real meaning without introducing a mixture of metaphors 
which our language cannot bear as the Hebrew can. 

Some of the comments on verses 24. and 25. provoke our 
wonder how any one can have read through twenty-two 
chapters of Isaiah, and yet be puzzled by the transfer of the image 
of the nail from Eliakim in the former, to Shebna in the latter, 
verse ; or can think that the difficulty is cleared up by taking the 
poetical picture of the honour which would redound to Eliakim's 
whole family from his just and able administration, for a de- 
scription of excessive nepotism, which should be at last 
punished by a fate like his predecessor's. 

Here, if not before, we shall get much light on Isaiah's times, 
and the meaning of his discourses, by a comparison with the 
accounts of like national conditions in modern times, and espe- 
cially those which thoughtful sufferers and actors during the last 
European Avar have given us. JSTiebuhr's Letters, for instance^: 
he illustrates Isaiah (while Isaiah interprets him, by revealing 
the law of the new, as well as of the old events) in his account 
of e that dull comfortable existence which was described as the 
golden age of thirty years ago ;' of ' the aimless striving after 
something beyond ' which then arose, and c which, combined with 
the universal effeminacy, led to the miserable results' which 
they all experienced as their subsequent condition : — of ( the 
dissolution of all civil bonds and institutions being completed : ' 



* Isaiah, v. 1. 



NATIONAL INVASIONS IN MODERN TIMES. 



223 



of ( nine-tenths of the landowners ' (which in Germany includes 
the cultivators) c both in town and country ruined, yet who 
must still go on paying contributions — it cannot be otherwise 
till they are cut down to the bone ;' while 6 many, many thou- 
sands of our youths, of our men, are shedding their blood, are 
pining away their lives in hospitals, or in want and wretched- 
ness :' — of ( an innocent country' (Holstein) 'abandoned to 
pillage, reduced to misery,' apparently to be ff deliberately turned 
into a desert by an unprincipled policy and rapacity,' and its 
prosperity 6 fruitlessly destroyed, like some unhappy victim, 
whose fate it has been to experience only those sorrows which 
humiliate and enfeeble, and has no opportunity to make those 
sacrifices, by which individuals and nations are purified and 
exalted : ' — of ' life dragged along as a weary burden : ' — of 
c armies entrusted to boys, because they are the sons of princes ; 
divisions to generals who have outlived captivity,' — while the 
statesman ' who feels in himself that he could counsel and lead, 
remains in the back ground, not only because of a thousand 
miserable considerations, but because the hour of dissolution is 
not yet come, in which he would press forward : ' — of the error 
of fancying that 4 the general misfortunes and the approaching 
danger have produced a grave and solemn tone at the Court and 
seat of government ; ' where c all amusements go on just as usual : 
people look on the war as a subject of conversation, find fault 
with the English, abuse the Russians, comfort themselves with 
saying that the French are not so bad,' &c. &c. and e there is 
an everlasting talk, mostly without the slightest comprehension 
of the matter,' among these courtiers and rulers, while men like 
Niebuhr must e listen and not speak out their whole mind,' how- 
ever 6 their blood may boil with indignation : ' — of ( the sense- 
less prating of those who talked of desperate resolves as of a 
tragedy : ' — of the 6 untiring malice and inexhaustible wicked- 
ness ' of the political intriguers, c who have plunged this un- 
happy country into ruin,' while 6 all true help is shamefully cast 
aside ;' the utter f blindness of the king which allowed the pro- 
gress of political disunion ' to proceed to such extremity ; the 
6 lasting hindrance to all comprehensive undertakings arising 
from the mediocrity and baseness that can scarcely even now be 
dislodged from their present position of power;' and ( the vanity 



224 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



of the idea that a better day must follow the night of incapacity 
and little -mincledness : ' — of the * bitter grief and comfortless 
affliction ' which prompts him 6 constantly to ask himself whether 
we are really living in the same age of the world that we did 
formerly, or whether all before us is not, as it seems to our 
eyes, chaos and night, a universal destruction of all that now 
exists.' He feels, too deeply to be inclined to say much about it, 
that ' the dreadful decision of a great judgment-day of the world 
is at hand : ' — ( Now must begin either universal death and 
putrefaction, or the heavings of a new life : but where are its 
germs : ' — e this is the time when the elect are proved ; he who 
has endured to the end, will have a bright evening to his life, but 
for the present, happy ... are they who have learnt in other 
ways and former times to bear the cross : ' — he c begins to 
cherish the encouraging belief that many hearts have grown 
stronger and purer through danger and suffering, and that on 
all sides there lives a spirit, though straitened and repressed, 
whose power must increase : ' though it is so much c the most 
probable that they will have to endure the double sorrow of 
seeing this flame which has been secretly growing more intense, 
extinguished by oppression,' that he can only 6 almost believe 
that if God would take pity on them, they might though with 
bitter grief and pain, attain to something much better than 
their former state,' yet he urges his friend to c become the ad- 
vocate among others of that which as yet scarcely begins to stir 
in the bosom of night, but of which the existence is certain : 
let them not regard what still exists on the surface of things, 
and is the tottering wreck of an age gone by : ' the patriot may 
see ( the many elements of good striving for life, — of a better 
spirit than existed in happier time;' the Christian may c trust 
that a Comforter will come, a new Light when he least expects 
it,' and that 6 all the sorrow of this era will lead on towards 
truth if we are only willing.' And when deliverance is offered 
to them by the manifest and wonderful providence of God,' who 
has c smitten ' the oppressor c with blindness ;' there is first the 
recognition that this deliverance has come ( after God has 
chastened us sufficiently for our deep-rooted sins,' and that un- 
less it finds each of us ready to devote his life to its attainment, 
we cannot be saved;' and then we have the picture of this re- 



NIEBUHR'S ACCOUNT OF PRUSSIA. 



225 



quisite moral and religious acceptance of their salvation, ( the 
ground cleared and ready to bear fruit/ e love dwelling in every 
heart, and all ready to welcome whatever was noble and good,' 
and ( good will and good ideas ripening universally with good 
deeds : ' and if the f morality,' ( patience,' ' discipline,' ' huma- 
nity,' which makes us as well as Niebuhr ( feel a true reverence' 
for f an army so pure,' were once and for the first time, ( during 
the whole war,' broken down by e the great privations they had 
to suffer ' after the battle of Laons, — the young officer who 
reports it 6 could not sleep for grief ; ' the field-preachers took 
for their text, What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the 
whole world, and lose his own soul, and exhorted the men to 
return to the patience and honesty they had shown till lately ; 
the brave fellows wept bitterly, and promised with a loud voice 
to do so ; while General York reminded them of the sacredness 
of their vow .... that they ought to be as good as they were 
brave .... ordered one man to step forward from each com- 
pany .... and took their hand upon it that they would suffer 
anything rather than be guilty 6 of any excesses.' We may 
make such abatements as we think cool judgment demands from 
the glowing colours of the patriotic picture ; its value as an 
illustration of Isaiah will not be diminished. 

Zschokke thus moralizes on the French occupation of Swit- 
zerland : — s There are times — the Divine Providence has so 
ordained it — there are times when it is needful that the iron 
rod of doom should be stretched forth to arouse the nations of 
the earth from their senseless brooding over material interests 
and sensual wants; and to save them from the gradual brutaliza- 
tion into which they are frozen by the influence of forms no 
longer vital ; or from the degradation to mere mechanical motion 
and existence. National wanderings, crusades, and civil wars 5 
have ultimately left behind them greater blessings than those 
which they destroyed. There must be times of death and de- 
struction, to make room for new life. The devouring selfishness 
of the powerful would crush the weaker part of the human 
family, and cripple with its impious weapons the free wings of 
the soul, if from time to time the thunder-voice of a higher 
Will than man's did not proclaim, as of old, through the storm- 

Q 



226 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



clouds of Sinai, the voice of Jehovah ; " Thou shalt have none 
other gods than me ! " Such were the thoughts that chiefly 
occupied me as I travelled with Tscharner towards Aarau.'* 

* Zschokke's 'Autobiography, p. 71. English Translation. In Tholuck's 
preface to his Commentary on the Romans, (if I remember rightly) and in a 
paper of Krummacher's in the Reports of the Evangelical Alliance, there are 
like descriptions of the moral and religious effects of the war of freedom on 
the people and the king of Prussia,, 



ISAIAH XXIII. : THE riXENICIANS. 



227 



CHAPTER XVII. 

ISAIAH XXIII. : THE PHENICIAN8 HISTORICAL NOTICES THEIR TRADE 

— CARRIERS OF PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS — RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL. — ■ 

THE TYRIAN HERCULES THEIR RELIGION POLITICAL, NOT NATURAL. 

SIEGE OF THE ISLAND-TYRE BY SHALMANESER BY NEBUCHADNEZZAR — 

BY ALEXANDER PRESENT STATE. — AUTHORSHIP OF THE PROPHECY. 

THE DISPENSER OF CROWNS. THE QUEEN OF CITIES DISHONOURED. TYRE 

FORGOTTEN SEVENTY YEARS SHALL SING AS AN HARLOT. 

The fertile and well watered plain which undulates from the 
foot of Lebanon to the sea, along the north-west coast of Pales- 
tine, was the land of the people called Sidonians by the 
Hebrews and by Homer, but Phenicians by the later Greeks 
and the Romans. Sidon (the Fishery) was the most ancient of 
their cities : the Book of Joshua calls it ' the great,' Avhile it 
gives the epithet of i strong ' to Tyre, of which the tradition 
was, that it was founded 240 years before the building of 
Solomon's Temple, by fugitives from Sidon, then besieged by 
the king of Ascalon. Successive colonies filled the plain 
6 with great and fair cities/ from Tyre to Aradus, each of 
which seems to have had its own king, or judge, though in the 
time of David and thenceforward we find Tyre, and the king 
of Tyre, in apparent superiority over the whole people. They 
were a Canaanitish race ; and their land — first promised to 
Zebulun — was allotted to Asher *, to whom, however, it re- 
mained (as Gesenius elsewhere says) an inheritance in partibus 
infidelium : for in the days of the Judges, the Sidonians not 
only continued to dwell c careless, quiet, and secure,' but be- 
came the oppressors of the Israelites, f Lebanon supplied tim- 
ber for the Sidonian ships, near Sarepta were iron and copper 
mines, the sea yielded them the shells and the sand with which 



* Genesis, xlix. 13. 



f Judges, xviii. 7 , x. 12. 

Q 2 



228 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



to make their purple dye and their glass, and their women wove 
the variegated robes of which Homer speaks : and thus they 
began that trade which in after times exchanged the tin of Bri- 
tain, and the amber of Prussia, with the gold, the apes, the 
ebony, and the ivory of India, and of which Ezekiel has so 
gorgeously described all the details, as well as the wealth, luxury, 
and power of which it was the source. * By land their trade 
was conducted to a great extent (as we have before seen) by the 
Arab caravans ; by sea, their own ships carried them to Egypt, 
Greece, Italy, Sicily, Malta, Carthage, Spain, and perhaps 
even to America ; while the navy created by Solomon, with the 
help of their shipwrights and sailors, gave them a water com- 
munication with Arabia, and India, from the port of Elath at the 
head of the north-east gulf of the Red Sea. 

The creation of this Hebrew navy was one of the fruits of 
the alliance and friendship of David and Solomon with Hiram, 
king of Tyre : he also supplied them with materials and arti- 
ficers for building the Temple, palaces, and other public works ; 
and the rapid growth of the national wealth and luxury of Israel 
from this period, shows that their commercial intercourse with 
Tyre must have been considerable.! Probably then, as in the 
times of Ezekiel, they supplied the Tyrian markets with wheat, 
honey, oil, and balm ; and we may believe that a considerable 
part of the caravan traffic from Arabia would pass through their 
country, for the sake of the security afforded by a settled and 
civilised government. And thus, while Israel remained an 
agricultural country, as the whole scope of its constitution and 
policy required, it enjoyed as large a share of the benefits of 
commerce, as was compatible with the main historical ends for 
which the nation existed : — or, as Isaiah expresses it in the 
chapter before us, 6 The merchandise of Tyre was for them that 
dwelt before the Lord, to eat sufficiently, and for durable 
clothing.' ISTor was Phenicia's debt to Israel less, or less cha- 
racteristic: when a positive recognition of facts shall have 
superseded alike the opposite theories which — with superstitious 
reverence, or with scoffing sciolism — have conspired to exclude 
the Hebrew nation from its place in universal history, it will be 

* Ezekiel, xxyu. 

t 2 Samuel, v. 11. ; 1 Kings, ix. 10—14. 26—28.; x. 11—29. 



RELATIONS OF PHENICIA AND ISRAEL. 



229 



plain that it was not for nothing that Phenicia came in contact 
with a people whose institutions were based on a faith in family 
life, and in laws upheld by a righteous Lord ; and that at the 
time when Jewish life was embodied by David and Solomon in 
the forms in which it would be most easily intelligible to 
foreigners, there should have been a Hiram capable of appre- 
ciating their personal and political character. It was after this 
that Phenicia became the carrier of the germs and maxims of 
politics and philosophy to Europe : and her people knew their 
calling too well not to get these, like other things, from the best 
market ; though, like traders, they were content to hand them 
over to their customers, keeping little of them for themselves.* 

We notice in Ezekiel's list, i the persons of men,' brought 
from Javan (or Ionia), to the Tyrian market : and Isaiah's co- 
temporaries, Amos and Joel, complain that the Tyrians sold 
Hebrew slaves, * the sons of Judah and Jerusalem,' to the 
Edomites and the Greeks, notwithstanding the alliance and 
friendship which should have subsisted between the two na- 
tions f ; of which slaves, as well as of the f gold and silver, and 
precious goodly things' of the Israelites, they had possessed 
themselves by purchase from the Assyrian, or other licentious 
soldiery, who found in the Tyrians the shrewd and unprincipled 
traders who are always at hand to buy such plunder. To these 
complaints of the breaches of the ' brotherly covenant ' and 
friendly alliance between the two nations, the prophets had in all 
ages to add their resistance to the opposite abuse of that friend- 
ship, which introduced the worship of the Sidonian Astarte and 
Baal into Israel, and of which Solomon's apostasy, and the 
establishment of the priesthood of Baal by Jezebel the wife of 
Ahab, and daughter of Ethbaal king of Tyre, were but in- 
stances, though the most important ones. 

Melicartha, or Hercules — the Phenician and Greek equi- 
valents, according to an inscription from Malta — - was the god 
whose temple Herodotus went to Tyre to see, and found with 
its ' two pillars, one of gold and the other of emerald, both 

* See Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, §' Phoenicians] 1st 
and 2nd editions. 

t Amos, i. 9, 10.; Joel, iii. 4, 5, 6.' 

Q 3 



230 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



shining exceedingly at night,' and its rich offerings, which in^ 
eluded (as we know from other accounts) those of the Phenician 
colonies, in all of which the same god was worshippped. Meli- 
cartha means e king of the city,' and even Hercules is by some 
derived from a Hebrew word for 6 the Trader ; ' and it is pro- 
bable that he is the same as Baal, which was the general Pheni- 
cian name for God. 

Baal is constantly coupled with Astarte ; and the more phi- 
losophical opinion * is that this national god and goddess were 
the Lord and Lady of Phenicia, rather than the sun and moon I 
— for to a people full of political life the sun and moon would 
have been themselves representatives, while a divine king and 
queen were the realities. And if so, the habitual inclination of 
the Israelites, an essentially political people, for this worship 
becomes the more easily understood. A worship of nature — 
of cats and dogs — like that of Egypt, could have had little 
attraction for them ; but this of the Sidonians offered to sup- 
ply their craving for a national and political creed, yet without 
the holiness and righteousness of heart and life, which the wor- 
ship of the Lord of Abraham and of David required them to 
maintain by an habitual sacrifice of their sensual and worldly 
nature. 

Of the colonies or commercial settlements of the Phenicians, 
the prophecy before us mentions two — Tarshish and Chittim. 
Tarshish, or Tartessus, was a city and port between the two 
mouths of the Boetis, or Guadalquiver, in Spain, and the oldest 
of the Tyrian factories : and in this name, according to Gese- 
nius, the later Phenician settlements of Gades and Carthage 
were afterwards included, both by the Hebrew and the classical 
writers. Chittim, as the same authority shows, is Cyprus, in 
the south of which island was the Phenician settlement of 
Citium, in the ruins of which, still called Chiti, Pococke found 
Phenician inscriptions ; — but, as in the case of Tarshish, the 
name was extended, and in later times includes the other islands 
and coasts of the Mediterranean. 

Sidon (for a full topography and history of which, as well as 
of Tyre, I must refer the reader to Dr. Eobinson's Biblical 



* Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, ]st edition. 



HISTORICAL NOTICES OF TYRE AND SIDON. 231 



Researches in Palestine) is still a city of five or six thousand 
inhabitants, in the midst of well watered gardens and orchards 
— ' the flowery Sidon dwelling by the streams of the graceful 
Bostrenus'* — with some trade in silk, cotton, and nutgalls. 
Of ' Old Tyre,' the site is uncertain, as there are no remains to 
mark it: the Island-Tyre seems to have been originally a 
ledge of rocks, which the gathering sand formed into a narrow 
island less than a mile long, and not half a mile from the main 
land : according to Josephus, it was already occupied by the 
Tyrians in the time of Hiram, the friend of Solomon. In the 
reign of Elula3us king of Tyre (cotemporary with Hezekiah) 
Cyprus rebelled ; and Shalmaneser king of Assyria, who is said 
to have been called in by the city of Gath to protect it against 
Elula3us, invaded Phenicia ; and on the submission of Sidon, 
Arce, Old Tyre, and other towns, obtained from them a fleet 
with which to attack the Island-Tyre. But the Tyrians made 
peace with Cyprus, defeated the Assyrians at sea, and success- 
fully withstood a blockade of five years, in which, however, 
they suffered much from the cutting off of the aqueducts — of 
which the traveller still finds, if not the remains, which may be 
all later, yet the large and fine rushing streams, at the village 
named ( Well-head,' Colonel Bawlinson reports f the discovery 
of a notice of the capture of Tyre (I suppose Old Tyre) by 
Sargon : and a statue of the same king, with an inscription 
( suitable ' to the fact of his expedition to Cyprus, has been 
found in Cyprus, and is now in the Berlin museum. And Sen- 
nacherib, according to his annals, proceeded to Phenicia in his 
third year ; when Luliya (Elulseus) king of Sidon, who ( had 
thrown off the yoke of allegiance,' fled at his approach, and was 
replaced by Tubaal, on whom was 6 imposed the regulated 
amount of tribute,' after the whole country, including Tyre, had 
been reduced to submission. He then goes on to give a list of 
the kings who e repaired to his presence in the neighbourhood 
of the city of Husuva or Tyre, and brought him their accus- 
tomed tribute.^ To this period, says Gesenius, is to be re- 

* Dionysius Periegetes, O. T. D. 905. quoted by Eobinson. 
f Athenseum of Dec. 11. 1852. 

£. Outline, pp. 20. 23. Among the names are ' Mittinti of Ashdod,' ' Bud- 

Q4 



232 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ferred the founding of most of the colonies of Tyre, which 
consequently must now have been near its full vigour, notwith- 
standing these reverses. Under Ithobal II. Tyre was again 
besieged for thirteen years by Nebuchadnezzar, and apparently 
again proved impregnable.* The nation, however, seems to 
have been under the Babylonian, as afterwards under the Per- 
sian, yoke ; and ( they of Tyre and Sidon ' brought cedar from 
Lebanon to the port of Joppa, for rebuilding the Temple at 
J erusalem, in obedience to the grant of Cyrus, f A third siege 
of Tyre by Alexander the Great (about 332 B. a), ended with 
the reduction of the Island-Tyre, after seven months of despe- 
rate struggle on both sides, during which Alexander built a, 
mound or causeway from the main-land to the island. To supply 
materials for this, and the other works of the besiegers, Old Tyre 
was razed, never to be rebuilt ; but 6 the fortress of the sea,' 
and its trade, recovered both from this blow, and from that which 
the same conqueror gave them by building Alexandria. After 
Alexander's death it fell to the Seleucida?, many of whose 
Tyrian coins, with Greek and Phenician inscriptions, are ex- 
tant. In the time of Strabo, and under the Roman dominion, it 
was rich and flourishing, with its commerce and purple-dyeing 
trade ; with two harbours (formed by Alexander's mole which 
had made the island a peninsula), of which however only one, 
called the Egyptian, was open ; and with remarkably lofty 
houses, such as could not be seen in Pome itself. Tyre became 
Christian early J, and in the days of J erome was still e a very 
fair and noble city,' and traded e with almost all the world.' 
It was an archbishopric under the patriarchate of Jerusalem, 
with fourteen bishoprics under it. Taken by the Saracens in 
639; recovered by the Christians in 1124; in 1280, conquered 

astor of Beth- Amnion, and ' .... of Huduma, or Edom.' Then follows 
the passage I have already quoted above, p. 171. 

* I certainly think with Gesenius, that this is the fair conclusion to draw 
from Ezekiel, xxix. 18, 19. as well as from Jerome's admission that no Greek 
or Phenician history mentioned the capture. I have not, however, read 
Hengstenberg's Treatise ; and Mr. Grote speaks of the insular Tyre being 
' taken, or reduced to capitulate,' by Nebuchadnezzar, as an ascertained 
fact. 

f Ezra, hi. 7. | Acts, xxi. 4. 



ISAIAH XXIII. : DISPUTES AS TO THE AUTHORSHIP. 233 



by the Mamelukes ; and taken from them by the Turks, in 1516 ; 
it then sunk into a decay which corresponded literally with Eze- 
kiel's denunciations, when, at the end of the seventeenth century, 
Maundrell found not one entire house, but only a few fishermen 
harbouring themselves in the vaults. Since then it has some- 
what rallied, and Dr. Robinson found it a town of about 
3000 inhabitants, with some poor trade in tobacco, cotton, 
and wood. Alexander's causeway has become a sand-bank half 
a mile wide ; the ruins of the large cathedral are filled with 
mean hovels ; and if anything remains of the Tyre of Isaiah, 
it is the columns of red and gray granite which strew the ragged 
western shore of the rock, ( from one end to the other, along 
the edge of the water and in the water.' 

The dispute as to the genuineness of this prophecy offers a 
new feature, which is thus stated by Professor Alexander : — 
" The German writers of the new school are divided on this 
question. Eichhorn, Rosenmuller, Hitzig, and others, admit 
the reference to Nebuchadnezzar, but ascribe the prophecy of 
course to a contemporary writer. Gesenius, Maurer, Umbreit, 
and Knobel, admit its genuineness ; but refer it to the siege by 
Shalmaneser. Hendewerk also admits the genuineness of the 
passage, but denies its having reference to any particular his 
torical event. Ewald refers it to the siege by Shalmaneser ; but 
infers from the inferiority of the style, that it may be the pro- 
duction of a younger cotemporary and disciple of Isaiah. The 
discussion of the subject by these writers is, in one respect, in- 
teresting and instructive. In most other cases they occupy 
common ground against the truth. But here they are reduced 
to a dilemma; and by choosing different horns of it, are placed 
in opposition to each other, clearly betraying in the conflict that 
ensues, the real value of their favourite style of criticism. Thus, 
while Ewald thinks the style unlike that of Isaiah, and Eichhorn 
and Hitzig see the clearest indications of a later age, Gesenius 
and Hendewerk are struck with the tokens of antiquity and 
with the characteristics of Isaiah. So, too, with respect to the 
literary merit of the passage : Hitzig treats it almost with con- 
tempt, while Hendewerk extols it as a masterpiece of eloquence. 
There could not be a stronger illustration of the fact already 
evident^ that the boasted diagnosis of this school of critics is 



234 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



always dependent on a foregone conclusion. Had there been 
no siege of Tyre in the days of Isaiah, Gesenius would easily 
have found abundant proofs that the chapter was of later date. 
But this not being necessary for his purpose here, he treats as 
inconclusive even stronger proofs than those which he himself 
employs in other cases." 

This commentator then proceeds to argue in favour of the old 
orthodox explanation of the prophecy, as a prediction of the 
taking of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar. But I persuade myself 
that the reader has accompanied me thus far, with the under- 
standing that we were not, any more than the rationalists just 
described, to adopt ( a foregone conclusion,' an a-priori theory, 
as to the nature of prophecy and its fulfilment, and cut our 
facts to fit it ; but that we were to let the facts tell their own 
story, and be sure that whatever we could read of this would 
be God's truth, all commentators and critics notwithstanding. 
And if we have, on the one hand, found the book so replete with 
political, social, and personal wisdom, as to throw a clear light, 
not only on the history of Isaiah's own time, but on that of all 
other times and nations including our own — so that when we 
read of Babylon or Jerusalem, of Ahaz or Sennacherib, we 
perceive ourselves studying the universal propositions of a science 
by the help of a diagram : yet, on the other hand, we have 
found, mixed up with minute and interesting correspondences 
between details in the prophecies and in history, discrepancies 
and non-fulfilments of predictions at least as marked. Thus, 
in the last prophecy — the denunciation of Shebna and the 
worldly men of Jerusalem — Isaiah predicts that the city shall 
be taken by assault *, and both princes and people carried into 
captivity ; and that in particular this shall be the fate of Shebna, 
in order to make way for his successor Eliakim : and if the 
accuracy of the reading of the Assyrian Inscription (quoted in 
the last chapter) is finally established, and we then claim a right 
to apply its terms to the fulfilment of the prediction as to Shebna 
and the nobles, it remains certain that, instead of the city being 
taken, Isaiah himself soon after promised, with a confidence which 
the event justified, that the Assyrian should not even attempt 
the siege, f In like manner Isaiah had predicted the approach of 

* Isaiah, xxii. 3, 4, 5. | Isaiah, xxxvii. 33, 34, 35. 



THE DOUBTS NOT REASONABLE. 



235 



the invaders from the north, when they should appear under the 
walls of Jerusalem*, whereas, in fact, they came from the south- 
west ; though the other part of the prophecy, that they should 
then be cut off with a terrible crash, was fulfilled with striking 
accuracy. So the details as to the fate of Babylon, — the city 
taken during a feast by the Medes, cruel, regardless of gold, 
and riding two and two, with a cavalry of asses and camels as 
well as horses ; and the Arab in our own day, still fearing the 
satyrs if he pitches his tent in its ruins for a single night, — 
appear by the side of the threat that e her time was near to 
come,' and the fact that centuries intervened before its accom- 
plishment even began* 

What then ? If we cannot prove that Isaiah was inspired, by 
showing that he could predict future events more infallibly than 
the ancient oracles, or the modern astrologers or mesmerists, 
was he not inspired ? and are his writings not a part of God's 
Revelation ? Let the reader turn to the book itself ; and though 
he may not find these infallible predictions — which he may be 
sure he would have found, if they had been essential to God's 
communication of Himself to man — yet, he will find, reflected 
in each page, the light of that Holy Spirit, which in all ages 
has taught, and now teaches, the hearts of His faithful people, 
and so grants them to have a right judgment in all things, and 
to rejoice evermore in His holy comfort f ; and he will find that, 
as the same light in his own heart brings him into sympathy and 
intelligence with the meaning of what is recorded in those pages, 
they do reveal to him something of God's character and mind, 
and of His designs and dealings with man, which neither he, 
nor any one else, has known, except by their means. If the 
miraculous prediction were there, it would be but the sign : but 
we have the Inspiration and the Revelation themselves, super- 
seding all signs. 

If, then, we take the prophecy before us to be of the same 
kind as those which have preceded it, our historical remains are 
quite sufficient to bring Tyre into cotemporary connection with 
Isaiah, and quite sufficient to preserve that connection onward 
through successive ages, without our demanding any proof that 



* Isaiah, x. 28—34. 



f Collect for Whitsunday. 



236 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



either Shalmaneser, or Nebuchadnezzar, did, or did not, take the 
city, and without being anxious for the confirmation of the 
reading of Sennacherib's account, much as it is to the purpose. 

Isaiah sees the city and country of Tyre in the power of the 
enemy, and tells the fleets home-bound from the western colo- 
nies, that they will learn, when they are off Cyprus, that their 
own harbours and hearths are desolate. The inhabitants of the 
Island-Rock are silenced, by the ruin of its merchants who 
made Egypt its never failing granary — barren rock as it was — 
by making it a mart of nations. f The Black ' (Sihor) was the 
Greek and Latin, as well as the Hebrew, name for the Nile, 
with its fertilising black mud ; and we notice Isaiah's wonted 
poetic taste in minute points, in calling the Egyptian harvest 
6 the harvest of the river,' and not of the earth. His next 
image is bold and grand enough : he calls the nation of sailors 
whose dwellings were their ships, and their chief city an island, 
6 the sea ;' explaining (lest it should be too bold) that he means 
the 6 stronghold of the sea.' It is doubted whether verse 5. 
means that when the tidings reach Egypt, the Egyptians will be 
grieved at the ruin of their great market ; or, that the alarm in 
Phenicia, or among the nations generally, will be as great as 
when on some former occasion — whether the fall of No-Ammon 
lately, or even the destruction of Pharaoh at the Red Sea — 
the like news was heard of Egypt, famous to the world, and of 
which the prosperity was so important to the Tyrian commerce. 

Herodotus and Strabo speak of kings in the smaller Pheni- 
cian cities, as well as in the colonies of Tartessus, Citium, and 
Carthage ; and we Englishmen need not go to Genoa or Venice, 
with their doges and senates, their kings of Corsica and Greek 
dependencies, for examples of a nation of merchants who are 
princes and dispensers of crowns : — we need only look at the 
6 Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies, 5 extending 
their rule over a great continent, and there setting up and pull- 
ing down kings and emperors at their will. Tyre (like other 
nations) was noted for the severity with which she ruled her 
dependencies ; but now their bonds are loosed, and the prophet 
tells Tarshish, which, with its natives working as slaves in the 
Spanish silver mines, may have been the hardest treated of all, 
that she is free as the Nile, the river that least regards any 



ISAIAH XXIII. : THE LADY OF KINGDOMS. 



237 



bounds, to wander at her own sweet will.* And the proud 
queen of cities herself, she who so long sat in glory, rejoicing 
in her wealth and power, and in that antiquity of which the 
Phenicians were so proud, shall fly, a dishonoured woman, and 
on foot, for refuge to her colonies — to Tarshish or to Chittim 
— but even there shall find no rest. For the enemy may pursue 
her, and the colony may retaliate for its past wrongs, of which, 
in fact, we see an instance at the date of this prophecy, when 
Cyprus and the cities of Phenicia assisted Shalmaneser in the 
siege of Tyre, as has been mentioned above. 

The word translated e merchant' in verses 8 and 11, is e Ca- 
naan ' in the Hebrew, which Gesenius illustrates by the like use 
of Chaldean for Astrologer ; and of Jew, Swiss, Savoyard, and 
Italian, to indicate various modern callings : at the same time 
he observes that it is not unlikely that the name Canaan may, 
according to its etymology, mean the land, or people, of traders. 

It is the Lord of hosts, whose counsels bring this ruin upon 
Tyre ; and His instruments are the Chaldeans, at this time 
vassals and auxiliaries of the Assyrians, and whose modern 
establishment at Babylon is contrasted with the antiquity of the 
nation they destroy. The Chaldeans may, or may not have 
been specially employed by Shalmaneser or Sennacherib in the 
siege of Tyre ; they no doubt served in his armies, as the tribes 
ofElam and Media did, As I have already noticed this mention 
of the Chaldeans, when considering chapter xiii., I will here 
only point out, that it is exactly analogous to that of Elam and 
Kir in the last chapter ; and that there is no more necessity in 
the one case, than in the other, for supposing that the prophet's 
phraseology must, if taken without prejudice, indicate the nation 
chiefly interested in the war, and not a dependent people who 
were serving as auxiliaries. 

Tyre shall be forgotten 6 seventy years, according to the days 
of a king ; ' — a Hebrew idiom, obscure to us, though probably 
plain enough to Isaiah's hearers ; but of which the most pro- 
bable sense is, that the round number here, as elsewhere, indicates 
an indefinite, though considerable time, and that the prophet 
farther limits this by a phrase equivalent to ( for about a whole 



* " The river wandering at its own sweet will." — Wordsworth. 



233 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



generation.' c The days of a king,' the representative of a na- 
tion, seems fitter to express c for a generation ' than e the days 
of a man ' would have been : and we may compare the phrase 
with 'the days of a hireling,' in chapters xvi. 14., xxi. 16.; 
c as the years of a hireling mean years computed strictly, so 
the days of a king may mean days computed freely.' At 
the end of this time, the Lord will visit Tyre : the old alliance, 
c the brotherly covenant,' shall be renewed with Israel, and 
Tyre shall share with the other nations of the earth the bless- 
ings which Isaiah promises to them all in turn, when they shall 
have come, through sufferings, to the knowledge of the God of 
Israel. Then Israel will have a part in the worldly prosperity 
of Tyre, as Tyre in her spiritual. This restoration of Tyre 
is foretold by a strange though expressive image : — at the 
end of seventy years Tyre shall again play the harlot with all 
the nations of the earth : and her gains shall be holiness to the 
Lord. The harlot * converts into a matter of traffic what should 
be a sacred relationship : so trade brings men together merely as 
buyer and seller, not as brethren ; and consequently rapidly de- 
generates from self-interest into selfishness, unless it be perpe- 
tually counter-balanced by other and nobler aims in the man. 
The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets saw that, in their times, 
and for their nation, such counterpoises could not be made 
effectual, and therefore discouraged commerce itself : and the 
contemptuous image of the harlot implies this feeling here, 
though we have at the same time the recognition that trade is 
not essentially evil in the declaration that its gains shall be de- 
dicated to the Lord. The Mosaic law which expressly forbid 
the offering to the Lord the gains of a harlot, may tell us that 
Isaiah has here laid aside his illustration, as poets and orators 
do, as soon as the momentary purpose is served, though to the 
perplexity of their prosaic commentators. The explanation that 
verse 1 6. is not Isaiah's address to Tyre, but an extract from 
some popular song of the day called c the harlot's song,' is pre- 
ferred by the modern translators. 

* Harlot is { Lire-lot,' and originally synonymous with ' hireling.' Chaucer 
says of the ' Sompnour,' or servant of the ecclesiastical court, 
" He was a gentle harlot, and a kind." 



ISAIAH XXIV— XXVII. : DESOLATION OF JUDAH. 239 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

UTTER DESOLATION OF JUDAH — ACTUALLY CAUSED BY THE ASSYRIAN ARMIES. 

— NATIONAL COVENANT^ BROKEN BY AHAZ HE SHUTS THE TEMPLE. 

GOD'S COUNSELS OF OLD. MOAB PUT FOR ASSYRIA. — PATIENCE IN NATIONAL 

CALAMITIES. — THE WIFE DIVORCED, AND TAKEN BACK. THE SILVER 

TRUMPET SOUNDED. — EXPANSION OF ISAIAH'S VIEWS. 

Isaiah xxiv. to xxvii. : — It is agreed that these chapters form 
a continuous discourse. The older controversy as to its subject, 
has naturally produced the modern one — in which the rationa- 
lists differ among themselves as well as from the orthodox — as 
to its date and author. A clear summary of these, with refer - 
ences to the writers in whom they can be studied at large, is 
given by Professor Alexander : to this, and to his admirable 
and conclusive judgment, that the higher criticism, as to the style 
and authorship, has here proved itself to be arbitrary and worth- 
less ; while the endless diversity of opinions, as to the subject of 
the prophecy, show that it is generic, and not to be restricted to 
one particular event ; I refer the reader. 

Let us, then, return to the simple method, which has hitherto 
reconciled the essential parts of all the various views, instead of 
compelling us to choose one to the exclusion of the rest; and 
here, as before, take the text as it stands, and consider that 
Isaiah is, as usual, setting forth — forth-telling rather than 
foretelling — universal laws, with a special (and to us chiefly 
illustrative) application to his own times. 

The contents agree well with the date, which is indicated by 
the place of the prophecy in the book : — namely, about the 
time that Sennacherib was besieging Lachish or Libnah, and 
after the fall of Ashdod. Ashdod was about thirty miles from 
Jerusalem ; and Samaria, which fell into the power of the As- 
syrians, and became available as one of their military posts and 
bases of operation, in the sixth year of Hezekiah, was nearly 



240 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the same distance. And as Lachish and Libnah were nearer 
than either, we have only to remember the extent of ground 
that a large army covers, and the way in which even modern 
Christian armies, and much more those of ancient barbarians, 
sweep, and always used to sweep, whole countries with c the 
besom of destruction,' to understand that Isaiah's picture of 
what he and his fellow citizens were seeing around them, and 
daily expecting, is no exaggeration of reality. Facts, at such 
times, go beyond the strongest imagination. And we shall have 
a more accurate conception of the state of things, if we re- 
member that this last invasion of Sennacherib came upon a 
people already exhausted by the repeated calamities which, from 
the end of the reign of Jotham, had fallen on them from every 
quarter. We may here look back with advantage to chapter i., 
which, whatever its date, describes precisely the condition of 
Judea and Jerusalem, about the fourteenth year of Hezekiah's 
reign. 

The Hebrew employs the same word for c earth ' and e land,' 
and our own translators, like others, approach this poetic inde- 
finiteness, by giving sometimes one, and sometimes the other. I 
might repeat a like remark as to the interchange of the future 
and preterite tenses ; but hope the reader, even if unacquainted 
with the original, has already sufficiently realised this charac- 
teristic, to find it a help rather than a hindrance to his enjoyment 
and appreciation of the Hebrew seers. 

The Lord is come to judge his people. Ahaz shut up the 
Temple, and altogether changed the national worship for ido- 
latry : and though this public and open c transgression of the 
laws, change of the ordinance, and breach of the covenant' 
with the Lord of the nation, was publicly atoned for by He- 
zekiah, yet there was but too much evidence that the greater 
part of the people were still, as to heart and faith, better repre- 
sented by Ahaz than by his pious son and successor : and there- 
fore the Lord w T as c turning upside down ' the whole country — 
man and beast, cultivated fields and walled cities, political order 
and social relations — emptying out and scattering its contents, 
as if it were a bottle, or other vessel. The prophet sees Jeru- 
salem in confusion, taken by assault, and the people in voluntary 
exile or captivity. 



ISAIAH XXV. : GOD'S COUNSELS OF OLD. 



241 



But from the beginning it was a part of his office to preach that 
e a remnant should return/ and (whether alluding or not to any 
passing event we cannot now say) he sees this remnant, brought 
through suffering to the knowledge of their Lord, and raising 
songs of praise to Him in the various lands in which they are 
scattered. Their lot seems to him even better than his own and 
that of his countrymen at home ; for at home the spoiler and the 
' treacherous dealer ' are upon them, they are hunted from one 
refuge to another, and the windows of heaven are opened as in 
the days of Noah, and the foundations of the earth shaken as 
with a universal earthquake : — 

Broken, all broken is the earth ; 

Shattered, all shattered is the earth ; 

The earth dotli quake, doth quake exceedingly ; 

The earth doth reel, doth reel, like a drunken man, 

And swayeth to and fro like a hammock. 

Such is the more literal rendering ; the verbs (as in verse 3.) are 
repeated in the intensive form, in the Hebrew ; and I do not 
see that its wild force is not admissible into an English version. 
The hammock (the same word as in chap. i. 8.) is still used 
thoughout the East by the night-watchers of vineyards. 

In that day the Lord will come to judge both the haughty 
and worldly nobles of Judah, and also the still more haughty 
and worldly kings of the earth, who have been the instruments 
of His righteous judgments : they shall be visited first with 
punishment, and afterwards with pardon, while the Lord of 
hosts shall establish His kingdom in Zion, and call His servants 
— the Hezekiahs, Eliakims, Isaiahs, and the body of faithful 
and holy men, in that as in every other age — to be His se- 
nators, His council and fellow-workers in His glorious reign. 

The prophet speaks, or writes, in the actual, and apparently 
increasing, desolation of his own country : but he has such clear 
and bright views of God's counsels and plans from the beginning, 
and of the wonderful way in which He works them out in faith- 
ful conformity to His original design, that they present them- 
selves to his illumined eye as already accomplished : and while 
he sees the Lord reigning gloriously in Jerusalem on the one 
hand, on the other he contemplates the defencecl cities of the 

R 



242 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



terrible nations — Babylon or Nineveh, and the whole polity of 
arbitrary godless power, which they represent — reduced to a 
heap of ruins ; and the furious rage of those nations which was 
now breaking upon Judea like a hurricane, he sees brought 
clown as quietly and as completely as the burning heat of an 
Eastern sun is subdued by the shadow of a cloud. And thus 
passing from images of violence to those of gentleness, he con- 
templates the day when all the nations and peoples over whom 
the dark covering of that heathen tyranny is now spread, shall 
come up to keep the feast at Jerusalem, in fellowship with Israel, 
and shall there rejoice with them in worshipping the Lord and 
receiving His laws. The Assyrians themselves do not seem to 
be included here, or in any part of these chapters, among the na- 
tions to be thus blessed ; unless it be in verse 22. of chapter xxiv., 
and there it is doubtful if such be the meaning. The faith 
that even Assyria was eventually to become a part with Israel 
of the inheritance of the Lord, is unequivocally expressed in 
chapter xix. : but we cannot wonder that Isaiah should have 
ordinarily spoken of this cruel tyranny as merely evil and ob- 
noxious to entire destruction : nay, we may say, that — consi- 
dering the unavoidable limitations which control human thought 
and language — less extreme denunciations would not have de- 
clared, in the way which the circumstances of Isaiah and his 
countrymen needed, that the Lord was the righteous and un- 
sparing judge of all selfish, godless, tyranny and rapacity. 

I have already noticed the idiom by which, in all probability, 
Moab, in xxv. 10., is put for Assyria, as Babylon in the Book 
of Revelation means Rome. Isaiah's exuberance of imagi- 
nation, and love of concreteness — elsewhere exhibited by such 
names as c The desert of the sea,' 6 The valley of vision,' 6 Ariel 
the city where David dwelt,' — may sufficiently account for the 
usage : but it is worth while to consider that in times of strong 
and deep religious enthusiasm, such as our Civil War, or the 
days of Wesley and Whitfield, when men would be more than 
usually apt to choose the most expressive, instead of merely tra- 
ditional phrases, these concrete symbols become especial fa- 
vourites. The ( fortress ' in verse 12., and the ( lofty city ' of 
verse 5. in the next chapter, are plainly the same as the 'palace 
of strangers,' and ' city of the terrible nations/ above. With 



ISAIAH XXVI. : PATIENCE IN NATIONAL WOES. 243 

these, and their fall, Isaiah now contrasts the strong city in the 
land of Judah, which has the salvation of J ehovah for its walls 
and bulwarks. And he pnts into the mouth of the people of 
Judah, a song, such as they were accustomed to sing, as they 
went up from their houses to the temple, in festive procession, 
to worship. It was not very long since Hezekiah had opened the 
gates of the temple, shut by the profane Ahaz, and had renewed 
the public worship of the Lord with burnt offerings accompa- 
nied by f the song of the Lord,' and with trumpets and the 
instruments of David * : but on less grave occasions than their 
return from national apostasy, the opening of the gates of the 
temple to receive the procession of worshippers seems to have 
been a solemn ceremonial f ; and here Isaiah represents the tem- 
ple receiving the redeemed and righteous nation, which by 
keeping to its faith and trust in the Lord, has obtained peace of 
heart instead of the miserable state of anxiety, and national 
deliverance instead of the foreign oppression, described in chap- 
ter xxiv. The Temple, and J erusalem itself, stand on a rock ; 
but their true foundation is the Rock of Ages, Jehovah Him- 
self. The image of the tyrant city brought to the dust, and 
trodden by the feet of the poor, suggests the thought of the 
path in which those feet had previously been walking. It led 
through the midst of God's judgments, through a land de- 
voured by the curse ;' but they waited patiently, and found that 
God was leading them all the way, and making the path level 
and straight before them as they went. The ' waiting ' sug- 
gests a new image : during the long night of Assyrian oppression, 
their soul had longed for rest, or for the morning to close a night 
in which no rest was possible ; and with the first dawn of de- 
liverance, their spirit would spring forth to new activity, 
desirous to practise the righteousness it had learnt through 
affliction. But there are some so reprobate that neither cor- 
rection nor mercy will teach them righteousness : even in the 
restored and holy nation they will continue their evil doings, 
their selfishness and their oppression of the poor, and will refuse 
to recognise the invisible King and His laws : and therefore the 
zeal of the Lord in the restoration of His true people shall 



* Chron. xxix. 3. 27—30. 



t Psalm, xxiv. 6, 7. 9., cxviii. 19. 



244 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



prove a consuming fire to destroy these His enemies. Verse 12. 
corresponds with our prayer, e Give peace in our time, O Lord, 
for there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O 
God : ' other lords have had dominion over the nation, because 
it has chosen other gods ; but henceforth Judah will worship no 
God but the Lord, and He will again be both God and King 
to her, while those other kings and gods are become dead men 
and spectres, never to rise to life and power again. The word 
translated 6 deceased ' in verse 14, and 6 dead ' at the end of 
verse 19*, is c rephaim,' and means both e giants' and ( silent 
ones ; ' so that it expresses a notion something like that of our 
word e spectres : 5 this word, and other parts of the imagery, 
indicate a connection between these verses, and the 21st; and 
there will not be much difficulty in following this connection, if 
w r e remember that it is an under-current of poetical imagination, 
and not a series of dry syllogisms ; and that, as is usual with 
Isaiah, there is a certain alternation of ideas, which makes the 
light and dark, the present and the future, of the vision, rise 
and fall like the waves of the sea. Thus, no sooner has the 
thought of the destroyed heathens suggested that of the in- 
creased numbers and prosperity of Israel, than the prophet is 
reminded that, instead of their being able to rejoice in any such 
increase, they are like women who have not brought forth chil- 
dren, and whose prayers | and pains are without result : but im- 
mediately his confidence revives : — J udah's dead, and shades of 
the dead, the dwellers in the grave and the unseen world, are 
not like Assyria's dead ; for a dew, such as makes the grass 
grow, is fallen upon them, and they shall e awake and sing,' — 
Judah shall not merely bring forth more children in the place of 
those she has lost, but the very earth shall give birth to those 
already dead. Yet the present is a time of affliction : — Yes, 

* As in chap. xiv. 9. 

f A whispered prayer : " beautifully expressive," says Alexander, " of 
submissive, humble prayer, like that of Hannah when ' she spake in her 
heart and only her lips moved but her voice was not heard,' although, as she 
said herself, ' she poured out her soul before God,' which is the exact sense 
of j-1p¥ in this place. A like expression is applied to prayer in the title 
of Psalm cii." The whole description of Hannah, 1 Samuel i., is most 
apposite 



ISAIAH XXVII. : THE WIFE DIVORCED, AND TAKEN BACK. 245 

but only for e a little moment ; ' and the Lord's people have 
only to wait patiently, and they will see Him come to deliver 
them, and to punish all evil-doers ; and then the earth will 
disclose and give up her slain for another purpose — that they 
may rise in the judgment against the tyrants of whose guilt 
there seemed no evidence. The ' song ' which began in verse 1. 
is usually considered to end with verse 19., while verse 20. de- 
clares, in the Lord's name, that it is only necessary to wait a 
short time for * that day' in which the song may be fitly sung : 
but I have some doubt whether these precise, classic-like, de- 
marcations, are not as foreign to the Hebrew and prophetic 
genius as they are difficult to determine without arbitrary changes 
of the literal sense of the text. The ( entering into the cham- 
bers' may, not improbably, allude to the command that the 
children of Israel should not go out during the night of the 
destruction of the first-born of Egypt : and if we do not, with 
Grotius, suppose another allusion to Hezekiah's shutting him- 
self within the walls of Jerusalem, till Sennacherib's army was 
cut off, the correspondence of the two may perhaps be attributed 
to the influence which a poet's imagination must always feel 
from the important events about him at the time. The idea of 
the Lord, the king, leaving His royal residence, visiting the 
places where crime has been committed, and judging and exe- 
cuting sentence on the criminal, we have had before. 

Leviathan, which in Job means the crocodile, here stands for 
a great sea-serpent or dragon, and thus represents the Assyrian 
power. As regards the various controversies on verses 3, 4, 5. 
of this (27 th) chapter, it is enough for me to refer to what I 
have said above and elsewhere, as to the attempts at classical 
demarcations ; and to observe that the briars and thorns seem 
to be the evil part of the Jewish nation, which needed to be 
cleared out of the vineyard, rather than the foreign power 
which was made the instrument of that clearance. The i taking 
hold of my strength ' is best explained by the double image of 
taking refuge in a fortress, and at the horns of the altar. The 
idea in verse 8. is by Ewald and Alexander explained to be that 
of the Lord inflicting on His faithless bride the moderate punish- 
ment of a divorce, for which 6 contending ' and ( sending away ' 
are the legal phrases : — the latter commentator adds that the 

R 3 



246 



HEBKEW POLITICS. 



temporariness of the punishment is indicated by c the day of 
the east wind,' as though (I suppose) the duration was limited 
by the time of the storm. The result of this punishment shall 
be that the images, or the groves, of Baal and Astarte shall be 
thrown down, and their altars broken up, and the fragments 
scattered about like the chalkstones which (as Strabo mentions) 
were familiar objects on the ground near Jerusalem. But the 
heathen enemies of Israel are incapable of reformation, because 
they are ( a people of no understanding:' and therefore the pro- 
phet foretells their utter destruction : he transfers to them the 
image of the vineyard, and pictures it as the prey of the 
weakest destroyers (compare e feet of the needy ' above) : — the 
calf shall browse on the green vines, and when they are withered, 
the women shall gather them for firewood. In that day the 
Lord will gather (literally ( beat,' or 6 thresh,' as the manner 
was) the fruit of His oliveyards, and gather the remnant of 
His own people from the north to the south, collecting them 
with such care — literally 6 one to one,' — that not one shall be 
lost. The great silver trumpet, the blast of which, from the 
days of Moses in the wilderness, had gathered the princes to 
council, mustered the hosts in the camp, or called the Lord 
and His people to remember the national covenant 6 in the day 
of their gladness, in their solemn days, and over the sacrifices 
of their burnt offerings and their peace offerings,'* shall be 
heard in that day of the Lord, — 

i And they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of 

Assyria, 

And the outcasts in the land of Egypt, 

And shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem. 

It would be no less silly than dishonest to pretend that these 
chapters are by Isaiah, if there were evidence to the contrary : 
and if their genuineness were merely doubtful, we must ab- 
stain from drawing from them any of those historical or biogra- 
phical conclusions which authentic documents might supply as 
to the times and character of the writer. But in as far as I 
may venture to form an opinion, I must say, that the sceptical 



* Numbers, x. 1 — 10. ; Jeremiah iv. 5. ; Joel, ii. 1, 15. 



EXPANSION OF ISAIAH'S VIEWS. 



247 



criticism has not, as to these chapters, even an appearance of 
more than ingenious trifling ; the arguments founded on asserted 
peculiarities of style and diction in the original, are, as usual, met 
by counter-arguments, or positive denials of the facts, on the 
part of the orthodox scholars, as well as of the non-orthodox Ko- 
senmiiller : my own views on the possibility of proving anything 
by such arguments I have already stated. And therefore, since 
Isaiah's name is on all the old, genuine title-pages, and only 
omitted in the modern, spurious ones, let the reader keep, like 
me, within the limits of ordinary, matter-of-fact, common-sense, 
English criticism, and then he will see something better worth 
his notice than whole continents of cloud-land. This is, the fact, 
that while we recognise, throughout these chapters, the old 
familiar features — the accustomed political faith and poetic 
genius — of Isaiah, we see how € the years that bring the philo- 
sophic mind,' and still more the sufferings, personal and national, 
which are God's opportunity for developing the spiritual life, 
were now telling upon the prophet. The tone is more subdued, 
and gentler ; the evangelical temper shows itself increasingly 
through the patriotic ; political events are more subordinate to 
the universal life of things ; and the national faith in the Lord 
of Judah and the J ew, is brought into more intimate dependence 
on the deeper trust in Him as the Loud of the Church and of 
the spirit of man. 

That a like religious temper of mind might be properly attri- 
buted to an imaginary prophet, living in Babylon during the 
exile, or in Jerusalem in the time of Cambyses, I allow : but 
historical fact, and coherent romance, are not the same thing. 



E 4 



248 



HEBREW TOLITICS. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE POLITICAL, MORAL, AND RELIGIOUS STATE AND PROSPECTS OF JtlDAH.-— 

ARIEL, THE LION OF GOD. WORLDLY STATE-CRAFT. TRUE INSIGHT. — - 

THE EMBASSY TO EGYPT. PERSECUTION OF THE PROPHETS. DUMB IDOLS 

AND THE UNSEEN TEACHER. THE HOLY SOLEMNITIES. TALMUDICAL AC- 
COUNT OF FESTIVE PROCESSIONS. — THE STROKE OF DOOM ON SENNACHERIB. 

THE REAL DELIVERER. — SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF WOMEN. THE SIEGE 

RAISED. EDOM PUT FOR ASSYRIA. RETURN OF THE RANSOMED CAPTIVES. 

Isaiah xxviii. to xxxv. — The correspondence of thoughts 
and images, and the unity of subject and sentiment, mark these 
eight chapters as successive paragraphs or sections of one pro- 
phecy ; and the whole contents accord with the date indicated 
by their place in the book. The reader will give the advocates 
of other views such a hearing as he thinks fitting. 

Chapter xxviii. The travellers' descriptions of the beauty 
of the hill and valley of Samaria, have probably strengthened 
the temptation of modern commentators to adhere to the literal 
explanation of the phrase c drunkards of Ephraim,' in spite of 
the difficulty it involves as to the date of the prophecy. This 
difficulty is then best got over in the way I have pointed out as 
to chapter xvii. ; but the phrase is exactly analogous to e men of 
Sodom,' in chapter i., as well as to the ordinary language of all 
the Hebrew writers, and may be taken without any violence to 
mean the leading men of Jerusalem, to whom all the rest of the 
chapter relates. Isaiah fuses into one image, the heads of the 
nation, crowned with flowers at their habitual debauches, and 
the capital cities — Samaria and Jerusalem — each reposing in 
its fertile valley, and crowned with a chaplet of towers inter- 
twined with vines and olives : the flowers are of themselves 
fading, and the Lord will follow up on Juclah the punishment 
He has already inflicted upon Ephraim, by casting their revellers' 
crowns to the ground with a strong hand, and trampling them 
under foot : — employing as his instrument the overwhelming 



ISAIAH XXVIII. : THE DRUNKARDS OF EPHRAIM. 249 

flood of Assyrian invasion. Yet this wrath is but the means of 
]ove : its purpose is that the Lord Himself may become the 
crown of glory and the diadem of beauty to all those who — 
not being utterly corrupt — shall remain from this purification 
of the land. In that day He will be wisdom to the judge, and 
in His strength the soldier shall turn back the tide of battle to 
the enemy's gate.* 

But at present not only are these — the hereditary nobles and 
heads of tribes, and the elected or appointed judges — wanting 
alike in military ability, and in judicial uprightness, but the 
priests (including the Levites) and the prophets — the ministers 
of national worship, and the teachers and controllers of educa- 
tion of the whole people — are equally f gone out of the way 
through strong drink.' Drunkenness was no doubt literally the 
habitual vice of the higher orders in Isaiah's time ; and then, as 
in all times, it was the symbol of every kind of debased subjec- 
tion of the human, to the animal, nature. Such nobles could not 
govern ; such judges could not administer, nor such priests ex- 
pound, the law ; nor was any 6 vision ' possible to prophets in 
whom the eye of reason and of faith was thus obscured. Lowth's 
explanation, that verses 9. and 10. are a scoffing speech of the 
drunken prophets, is usually preferred : but I have some doubt, 
as I have before said, whether these dramatic speeches are not 
often inventions of the commentators ; and the sense is as clear, 
if we understand Isaiah to ask how it is possible in this general 
debasement to find any one capable of learning true widom, and 
then to add (in the tone of remonstrance adopted in the epistle 
to the Hebrews), that though the nation was no longer in its 
infancy, and ought to be capable of manly knowledge, yet it did 
in fact require to be instructed again in the very rudiments, 
and to have these impressed on it by perpetual repetition. And 
then — whether the thought is suggested by that of drunken and 
scoffing stutterers, or of children unapt to learn — he tells them 
that the Lord will send them a teacher who shall speak to them 
with the barbarous Assyrian tongue : they will then hear words 
very different from those which they now despise, because they 
proclaim, e This is the rest ; cause the weary to rest ; ' and 



* 2 Sam. xi. 23.; 2 Kings, xviii. 8. 



250 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



they will then find these repeated warnings become their con- 
demnation, because they will have deprived them of all ex- 
cuse. 

He anticipates the answer of ( the scornful men that rule 
this people in Jerusalem ; ' for has he not heard it often enough, 
year after year ? It was their policy which in the time of Ahaz 
had delivered Judah from her imminent danger by bringing 
Tiglath-Pileser upon Syria and Ephraim : and if it was at the 
sacrifice of Judah's independence, and at the price of much tri- 
bute, to say nothing of the destruction of the sister-people of 
their own race, yet these evils were nothing In comparison of 
the advantages ; for they touched them — the rich nobles in 
Jerusalem — but little, seeing they had the land and the remain- 
ing wealth of the country accumulated in their hands, and could, 
by suitable perversion of the law, wring out from the poor 
enough means of luxury to last their time, whatever might hap- 
pen afterwards. Besides, they had not only secured themselves 
by a treaty with that personification of death and hell, the 
Assyrian, but they had outwitted him, — for what chance could 
a mere barbarian soldier have against the deep-laid policy of an 
old, long-civilised state? they were in communication with 
Egypt and Ethiopia, and at the proper time, they would bring 
the armies of Tirhakeh to free them from the power of Senna- 
cherib. And to this the prophet replies, that when the storm 
does sweep over the land, as it assuredly will, these f refuges of 
lies ' will prove no shelter to their builders ; they have been 
tried by the plummet of honesty and righteousness, and found 
to be so out of line that they must come down : but meanwhile, 
nay from of old, the Lord has Himself founded a really service- 
able house for His people — namely, the ancient constitution 
and polity of which He himself is the chief corner-stone ,* and 
the man who trusts in that foundation, believing that it really 
is there, will not be urged to any impatient acts of panic, what- 
ever may be the apparent danger. The reader will remember 
the descriptions of the enormous corner-stones in ancient Jew- 
ish buildings: and will compare our Lord's parable of the 
house founded on the rock. There is a doubt whether the last 
clause in verse 1 9. can be fairly translated ' Only to hear the 
report shall be a distress;' and whether it is not better to read, 



ISAIAH XXIX. : ARIEL, THE LION OF GOD. 



251 



c And affliction alone will make you understand doctrine/ allud- 
ing to verse 9., where the last two words of the original are the 
same. 

The Lord will break forth upon his own people, as he did in 
old times upon the heathen Philistines* : it is a c strange work ' 
thus to afflict and destroy the people of His love, as though they 
were heathens: but He has determined to do it, — to execute 
justice to the uttermost ; therefore let the mockers lake heed 
that they do not make this determination more stringent upon 
themselves, by persevering in their evil way. Then the prophet 
propounds a parable : the husbandman has a place, and a time, 
for each successive operation of his husbandry ; he now ploughs, 
now harrows, sowing one seed broad-cast, and another in rows ; 
beats out the corn with the heavy threshing-wain, and the 
light aniseed (perhaps used then, as now in Italy, to flavour the 
bread as well as to make spirit) with a rod ; and, finally, ceases 
from all these operations when all are completed, and the corn 
is ready to be ground (or actually ground) for bread. All these 
processes — in which we notice that the harsh ones of breaking 
up both the land and the grain predominate — are taught the 
husbandman by God: and their order and skilful arrangement 
are the reflection of His wisdom and plans. Isaiah leaves it to 
his hearers to apply the parable to their own case, and so to 
understand how the Lord is regulating all His dealings with 
the nation, to the end that He too may gather the wheat into 
His garner at last. 

Chapter xxix. The simplest meaning of c Ariel ' is e lion of 
God ; ' but it also signifies ' hearth of God ' when derived from 
another root. In the former sense it comes to mean e a hero,' 
as in 2 Sam. xxiii. 20.; Isaiah xxxiii. 7.; and in the latter it 
occurs inEzekiel xliii. 15, 16., for the brazen hearth of the great 
altar of burnt offerings, thence commonly called ( the brazen,' 
though the rest of it was of stone. There is no doubt that Jeru- 
salem is pointed out by this enigmatical name ; and the imme- 
diate context, as well as the expression in chapter xxxi. 9. — 
c the Lord whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in J erusalem,' — - 
wake it probable that Isaiah intended to involve both meanings 



* 2 Sam v. 18—25.; 1 Chron. xiv. 9—16, 



252 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



in the word, as though he had said, e Woe to the city of heroes, 
woe to the city of sacrifices : it shall now be put to the test 
what God and what man think as to both.' 

David, that lion of God, had first encamped against Jerusa- 
lem, and then made it the abode of his royal house, and the 
capital of his kingdom ; so that it became itself an Ariel, a lion 
of God, in the land : — 

Judah is a lion's whelp : 

From the prey, my son, thou art gone up : 

He stooped down, he couched as a lion, 

And as an old lion : who shall rouse him up ? 

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, 

Nor a lawgiver from between his feet, 

Until Shiloh come ; 

And unto him shall the gathering of the people be. 

And after the vicissitudes of 300 years, and in the midst 
of present dangers, the people of Jerusalem were still con- 
fident in the strength of their ( lion of God,' and year by 
year came up to the public festivals to lay their accustomed 
offerings on the c altar of God;' though with little remembrance 
that it was not in the altar and the city, but in the Lord Him- 
self, that David put trust, and found his strength. Therefore 
the Lord will bring Ariel low ; the proud roar of the lion shall 
be changed for the weak, stridulous voice, which the art of the 
ventriloquising necromancer brings out of the ground ; and the 
enemies of the Lord shall be sacrificed and consumed on the 
hearth of His altar. First, His spiritual enemies among the 
Jews themselves, but afterwards the heathen oppressors of His 
people ; and the lion shall recover his God-derived strength ; 
and thus both in adversity and in success, ' it shall be unto me 
as Ariel.' — " He who threatens your destruction shall vanish 
like a dream, i par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno: ' 
he who threatens your destruction shall awake as from a dream, 
and find himself cheated of his expectations; for — as Grotius 
beautifully says — spes sunt vigilantium somnia."* 

* Alexander on the verse : he also quotes from Barnes a passage in one 
of Mungo Park's Journals: — " No sooner had I shut my eyes than fancy 
would convey me to the streams and rivers of my native land. There as I 



WORLDLY CRAFT, AND TRUE INSIGHT* 



253 



The inhabitants of the now self-satisfied city draw themselves 
back in incredulous and contemptuous wonder on hearing 
Isaiah's warnings : and therefore he tells them, that they, their 
rulers, and their teachers, are so besotted — not with the tran- 
sient effects of wine, but with the abiding pressure of sin, — 
that they can comprehend nothing of God's methods and pur- 
poses. Where no vision — no insight into the divine govern- 
ment of the world — is, the people perisheth ; and such is the 
present condition of Jerusalem and Judah, of the learned and 
the unlearned alike. And the reason is, that though they con- 
tinue in the routine observance of all such maxims and rules of 
morality r and religion as the existing standards of social respec- 
tability demand ; yet they have no inward love and fear of God 
in their hearts. They wonder how Isaiah can pretend to teach 
them, the wise and prudent ; but they will wonder in another 
fashion when they see what the Lord actually does : they are 
satisfied that their astute counsels, though hidden as it seems 
from the Lord, are quite competent to meet the dangers with 
which His prophet threatens them ; but they will find that it 
is not from the Lord, but from its own confusion and disgrace, 
that this policy will have to hide itself. They have been turning 
things upside down at their own will : they put bitter for sweet, 
and call good, evil : they rest the home government, and the 
social prosperity of the country, upon a basis of oppression 
of the poor and aggrandisement of the rich by abuse of the 
powers of law and order; and the foreign relations of the 
state, on treaties degrading in themselves, and never intended to 
be kept faithfully, with Assyria and Egypt : and with all these 
schemes and practices they mean to restore, or prop up, the 
falling condition of a nation which has never yet prospered, ex- 
cept by adherence to the old fundamental principle of its con- 
stitution, — faith in the Lord, and in the covenant by which He 
became their King, and they His people, with mutual rights 
and duties. Isaiah can be as contemptuous as these { scornful 
men 5 themselves ; and he tells them that all this scheming, all 

wandered along the verdant bank, I surveyed the clear stream with tran- 
sport, and hastened to swallow the delightful draught ; but, alas ! disap- 
pointment awaked me, and I found myself a lonely captive, perishing ot 
thirst, amid the wilds of Africa." 



254 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



this turning of things upside down, is but so much clay in the 
hands of the Potter, who will do just what He originally in- 
tended, carrying out exactly the designs laid down by Him from 
the first : — all the turning upside down in the world will not 
alter the relation between the thing made and its maker. In a 
very little while there shall, indeed, be a complete reversion of 
the present state of things. The land was now ruled by men 
who were always on the watch for iniquity ; who made a man ob- 
noxious to the forms of law for trifles which had no criminal 
intent, in order to bring him under their extortions if they 
wanted his property, or under their crushing power if they 
wished to silence him, because he dared to plead for justice, or 
rebuke the unjust ruler as he sat in the gate ; and this force was 
constantly used in the one case and the other (as the whole his- 
tory of the Jews shows us), with no check but the victim's 
death. But these men shall be cut off, and cease ; the Holy 
One of Israel will re-establish his authority ; His word and His 
works shall be heard and seen of all men ; and the poor and the 
meek will rejoice in His protection and strength. The house of 
Jacob might, and must, be brought low for a time, for its sins ; 
he might be ashamed at his humiliation, and his face might wax 
pale at the prospect of his name being put out from among the 
nations, through the slaughter and captivity of his children : 
but the Lord who redeemed Abraham out of the naturalism in 
which he was living with the rest of his race, who gave him a 
spiritual position, and a promise to him and to his children, 
founded on that spiritual position, — He will remember His pro- 
mise, and bring back to Jacob his children ; and they too, like 
their first fathers, shall be seen to be not a race of merely natural, 
earthly creatures, but tf the work of their Lord's hands,' a 
chosen, spiritually organised people, capable of true wisdom and 
true obedience, and of actual fellowship and communion with 
the Holy God. 

Chapter xxx. begins with a new and more direct denun- 
ciation of the Egyptian alliance, devised by the men who 
e wove a web ' of plots, or sought to e cover themselves with a 
covering,' which Isaiah called f a refuge of lies,' in chap, xxviii. 
Zoan, the Tanis of the Greeks, was a royal city, and one of the 
most ancient of Lower Egypt. Hanes is, probably, Hnes or 



ISAIAH XXX. 1— 21. : THE EMBASSY TO EGYPT. 255 



Ehnes, the Anysis of Herodotus, and the Heracleopolis which 
was the capital of a nome of Middle Egypt, and a royal 
city, as may be inferred from Manetho's mention of two He- 
racleote dynasties. And if there were two or more cotem- 
porary kings in Egypt at this period (on which point the oppo- 
sing facts have been already stated), it would seem not unlikely 
that the Jewish ambassadors may have sought Tirhakeh at the 
latter city ; and, at the former, Sethos, the Tanitic king of 
whose invasion by Sennacherib Herodotus relates the well- 
known story. 

The beginning of verse 6. may be rendered either ( Oh the 
burden of the beasts,' or ( As to the burden of the beasts,' the 
word burden being taken literally, to describe the heavy load of 
presents which they were carrying through the difficulties and 
dangers of the desert between Judea and Egypt. If, however, 
there were any reason (which there is not) for preferring the 
metaphorical sense of 6 prophecy,' in which 6 burden ' is used 
elsewhere, there is still no occasion to suppose a marginal gloss, 
or anything more than a phrase of a form somewhat quaint to 
our notions; as though Isaiah had said, — f That caravan of 
asses and camels struggling through the sandy desert, among 
the lions and serpents, rises before me like a distinct vision, 
and deserves an episodic paragraph of its own. 

fi Kahab' is used here, as elsewhere, to signify Egypt; but it 
is uncertain whether it is an Egyptian word and name of the 
country, or only an enigmatical Hebrew name, like 'Ariel.' 
The Hebrew means 'rage,' or ' insolence,' and thence, in the 
opinion of some of the most eminent authorities, a 6 sea monster.' 
But the point is not settled ; and it remains doubtful whether 
we should here read, f Therefore I call her Rahab the inactive,' 
or f the blusterer that sitteth still;' or whether, only substi- 
tuting tf Rahab ' for ' strength ' in our Authorised Version, we 
should understand the passage to mean, 6 Therefore I have con- 
stantly warned the Jews that their true Egypt, their true 
security, is quiet faith in the Lord.' 

Isaiah then goes on to show that he does not consider this 
alliance with Egypt as a matter of mere temporal and temporary 
interest ; great principles, laws of universal application, are at 
stake, and their enunciation is worthy to be recorded in the 



256 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



most public and the most permanent ways; — on the wooden or 
brass table, where he that runs may read, and in the parchment- 
roll for future and quiet study, c that it may be for the time to 
come for ever and ever.' He remarks the state of heart which 
was dictating their whole policy ; their trust in Egypt abroad, 
and in 6 oppression and perverseness ' at home : he tells them 
their whole life is a rebellion and a lie; and that they are 
carrying this lie to its height, when they call on their seers and 
prophets, the national teachers and preachers, to help them in 
their work, — to tell them no more of the right, but only of the 
smooth, path : nay, call on them to leave the narrow, irksome 
way themselves, and to employ their office and powers in 
guiding them in that pleasant road by which they will escape 
from the Holy One of Israel, and His wearisome claims upon 
their consciences. To themselves their condition seems that of 
a strong and high wall, which can resist any violence from 
without ; but the prophet discerns, what they in their blindness 
cannot, that there is a crack beginning within, and that this 
internal pressure of their moral and social iniquity will, ere 
long, make their wall bulge out, and come down in over- 
whelming ruin in an instant, and when least expected. 

The expressions in verses 20 and 21. are among the indica- 
tions I have already noticed, that, in the time at which Isaiah 
spoke, such prophets as remained faithful in the general corrup- 
tion were repressed and silenced by persecution. These allu- 
sions might at first sight appear a reason for referring this 
prophecy to the reign of Ahaz, when the Temple was shut up, 
and the high priest himself assisted in new and unlawful rites ; 
but if we remember that the power of the worldly irreligious 
nobles of that period was still unbroken, we shall (as I have 
also noticed) find no difficulty in understanding how much 
persecution of the spiritual teachers would be still carried on in 
spite of Hezekiah ; and Isaiah's encouraging tone as to the 
spiritual aspect of things, in contrast with the temporal afflic- 
tions he foretells, shows that he saw signs (and if he saw them, 
they were there) that the tide was about to turn, just as he 
must have done when he denounced Shebna. For we shall 
have a very unreal notion of the Jewish kings and people, if 
we suppose that their national character, even in its most 



ISAI. XXX. 22—26. : IDOLS, and the unseen teachek. 257 



spiritual features, changed about instantly with a change of 
the occupant of the throne. It takes a generation to make any- 
such important change, and especially in so tough and inde- 
pendent a race as the Jews always were. And, lastly, it must 
be noticed that the teachers were as much f removed into a 
corner' by their own corruptness as by persecution. 

Jeremiah describes the idols as plated, or ornamented, with 
plates of gold and silver, and dressed in garments of blue and 
purple. When Josiah was purging the land from idolatry, he 
is said to have ( defiled ' the altars and high places by burning 
men's bones on them, by which act he at once expressed con- 
tempt, and prevented their being again employed for the same 
purpose. But these idols of which Isaiah now speaks, are the 
private household gods, which a merely national and public 
reform, like that of Hezekiah or J osiah, could never touch. 

Contrasted with these dumb idols on the one hand, and on 
the other with the faithful teachers of the restored and con- 
verted people, is the still small voice of God himself : the word 
which each man shall hear for himself in the inmost recesses of 
his heart, as of an invisible guide continually directing him at 
every step, that he diverge not the least from the straight 
path. 

The promise in verse 23. probably alludes, as so many other 
passages do, to the way in which the land actually lay waste in 
those days, whether ravaged by the enemy, or not cultivated, 
because men had no heart to sow where they could not hope 
to reap : and this picture of peaceful husbandry becomes a 
symbol of the political prosperity which should follow the over- 
throw of the Assyrians ; while both — as the connection with 
verses 20 and 21. shows — are types of the spiritual blessings 
which the prophet knew to be more worthy than either. As 
the prison- fare, the 6 bread of adversity and the water of afflic- 
tion,' were the tokens of God's wrath, so this succeeding plenty 
is of His favour, and of His actually feeding their souls with 
the bread of life. Then shall the Spirit, the divine life of 
which the Indwelling Word is the source, be poured out like 
rivers and streams of water, and fertilise the soul as they do 
the hills. To realise the full force of this favourite image of 
the sudden pouring out of rivers, we must remember that in 

s 



258 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



southern countries, ravines which have been dry for the whole 
summer, are suddenly turned into deep rivers. The flood comes 
down all at once. 

It is the Name, the power, and presence of the Lord, coming 
from far, because there was no man at hand to help, which shall 
work the hoped for, and promised, deliverance. By a fusion of 
one image with another, the judgments of the Lord upon the 
devastators of Israel, are described as a fierce fire with its 
mingled flame and smoke heavily ascending ; as the sentence 
of a king whose word is death to the criminal ; as an over- 
whelming torrent, like that to which the Assyrian himself was 
formerly compared * ; as a sieve in which the corn shall not be 
sifted from the chaff, but a sheer riddance made of both, while 
both (as the ancient manner was) are exposed to the wind — the 
blast of 6 His breath ; ' and as a bridle, not to guide them aright, 
but to lead them to their own destruction. 

In contrast with this punishment of the great oppressor, 
stands the joy of the delivered nation : — 

Ye shall have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is 
kept ; 

And gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe, 

To come into the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Israel. 

All the festivals were kept c from even to even,' this being the 
Jewish method of reckoning the day, as we see in the first 
chapter of Genesis, where the day is always said to begin with 
the evening. Thus the Sabbath began on Friday evening, 
and lasted till Saturday evening. But the passover was in a 
special manner the 6 holy solemnity kept in the night,' and from 
Matthew xxvi. 30., as well as from the still existing practice of 
the Jews, we know that a hymn was sung at the end of the 
supper. These are but the more literal signs that Isaiah 
throughout this passage (verses 27 to 33) is connecting the now 
near prospect of their deliverance from the Assyrian, with the 
old deliverance which the Lord wrought for them in the days 
of Moses and Pharaoh. This connection was subsequently 
recognised in the preservation (or it may be origination) of the 
tradition that Sennacherib's army was destroyed on the night of 



* Chap. viii. 8. 



isatah xxx. 27—33.: the holy solemnities. 259 

the passover : and if we enter into the spirit of those awfully 
magnificent 11th and 12th chapters of Exodus, and into the 
thoughts and hopes which were kept alive in the soul of every 
earnest Hebrew by the sacramental institution in which that 
national deliverance was perennially recorded, we shall be able 
to realise something of the depth of meaning conveyed by 
Isaiah to those who heard him, in the words, e Ye shall have a 
song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept.' But there 
were other festivals which, though not less religious, called for 
more 'lightness of heart' than the passover. A tradition*, 
which is so exact a counterpart of the various passages in the 
Old Testament referring to the same and like subjects, that its 
accuracy can hardly be questioned, enables us to picture to the 
life the scene which, in Isaiah's times, might have been witnessed 
all over the country, on the eve of the yearly feasts. When 
the season for presenting the first-fruits to the Lord and King 
of the nation arrived, the country-people assembled themselves 
in some chief village or town of their tribe. The men were 
required by the strict law of Moses to appear three times 
yearly before the Lord, and they would be accompanied by 
many of their wives and daughters, whether actuated, like 
Hannah, by the desire to offer some vow, or dedicate a first-born 
son in person, or only by the wish to see the great City on an 
occasion when the traders thronged its fairs, and the holiday- 
makers its feasts, as well as the worshippers its Temple. The 
party thus assembled passed the night before they went up to 
Jerusalem, in the streets, not to contract any ceremonial de- 
filement : at daybreak the head man of the company, — perhaps 
the village Levite — awakened them with the words, ' Rise, let 
us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God ; ' and they set forward 
in a choral procession. A bull with gilded horns, crowned with 
olive leaves, went first ; a piper playing on the pipe, the damsels 
with their timbrels, and the bearers of the baskets of wheat and 
grapes and the jars of honey or oil, followed after ; and the 
sacred dance kept time with the voices of the alternate choirs 
as they sang, e I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go up 
into the house of the Lord.' The simultaneous and silent halt, 

* Quoted by Vitringa, from the Talmudical Tract Biceurim. 
s 2 



260 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the prostration in prayer, the burst of weeping, which in the 
present day mark the arrival of a party of Jewish pilgrims on 
the first rising ground which commands a view of Jerusalem, is 
the melancholy shadow of the exultation with which their 
forefathers lifted up their eyes to the hills of Zion from the 
same spots, and saw the e city compact together,' with e peace 
within her walls and prosperity in her palaces.' The song was 
frequently repeated as they drew near the city ; and as c their 
feet stood within its gates ' the people of Jerusalem welcomed 
them with shouts and the priests with honour, and they pro- 
ceeded to present their offerings before the Lord, f at the same 
time reciting the confession in the form prescribed by Moses.' 
The Psalms called in our version e Songs of Degrees,' that is, 
6 of steps,' or e marches,' are all illustrated by this traditional 
account of the use of the one * here quoted ; for all are suitable 
for various occasions of solemn processions to the Temple : and 
other Psalms such as lxviii. are easiest understood in like manner; 
while the subject has farther light thrown on it by the historical 
description of the processions composed, not of a few villagers,, 
but of the army or of the nation, under its nobles, and headed 
by a David, a Solomon, or a Jehoshaphat.f 

And then Isaiah unites these images with those of the de- 
struction of the Assyrian by the glorious might of the Lord ; 
each stroke of the e rod of doom ' which now falls on him who 
e smote the nations with a perpetual stroke,' is accompanied by 
a burst of triumphal music J; and he sees the chariots and 
armies, and the bodies of their owners, consumed in the fire of 
God's wrath, as the filth of the city was consumed in fires kept 
constantly burning for that purpose in the valley of Hinnom, 
on the spot which had formerly been polluted by the sacrifice of 
children to Moloch. 

Chapter xxxi. If the whole land between Memphis and 
Thebes was filled with the king's stables, and if Thebes itself 

* Psalm cxxii. I do not mean to pronounce peremptorily on the ques- 
tions as to the meaning of this title. 

f 1 Chron. xv. xvi. ; 2 Chroft. v. vi.'vii. ; xx. 27, 28. 

J " The Boeotians and other neighbours . . . danced to the sound of joyful 
music when the walls [of Peirseus] were demolished." — Grote's Hist, of 
Greece, ix. 449. 



ISAIA.H XXXI., XXXII. : SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF WOMEN. 261 



could (as Homer says) send two hundred warriors with chariots 
and horses, out of each of its hundred gates, and if the astute 
politicians at Jerusalem were combining with the wise coun- 
cillors of Egypt to make these forces available against the 
common enemy, yet all this would be of no use. The Lord 
too has His policy and plans from which He swerves not, and 
which He does not carry out under the direction of worldly 
men, nor by their help. He will first let the nation learn the 
vanity of trusting in an arm of flesh, and then, when they begin 
to turn to Him from whom they have so deeply revolted, He 
will come to save them, as of old. The commentators have so 
repeatedly analysed the various parts of the group of poetic 
images of which this chapter consists, that I shall perhaps 
hardly be excused for adverting to the renewed allusion to the 
passover, when the prophet, in describing the action of the 
mother-bird which hovers over her nest, uses the word which 
gave the name to that institution. 

Chapter xxxii. The deliverance of Judah is to be effected, 
not by Shebna and his supporters at home and abroad, but by 
the right hand of the Lord of the nation : its condition, on the 
side of the nation, is not the diplomacy of those rulers and 
councillors, but a national and personal turning from idols to 
the true God ; and its result will be, not the confirmation of 
the wealth and power of the selfish worldly men as they hoped, 
nor the removal of the still existing restraints on their habits of 
aggrandising and enjoying themselves without regard to God 
or man, while they defied the one and oppressed the other ; — ■ 
but the establishment of righteousness throughout the land, the 
king and his princes ruling in justice and humanity, the priests 
and prophets teaching even the most ignorant to ( understand 
knowledge ;' and the whole of society showing that moral re- 
formation which is never more certainly indicated than by the 
right use of those words which denote men's moral qualities. 
We have seen what Thucydides says on this point; but we have 
only to look at home to see how our neighbours and ourselves 
give all such words as conscience, morality, honour, virtue, 
charity, justice, religion, a meaning base or noble, in exact 
correspondence with the speaker's own moral state. 

Men have, more than women, to do with specific movements 

s 3 



262 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



and changes in a nation's social life ; but the regular, ordinary, 
ceaseless current of that life is carried forward by women : the 
women whom Isaiah now addresses, were at ease in the midst of 
the imminent invasion and siege, because the calamity had not 
yet touched them : their vintage had not yet failed ; the ( careless 
daughters ' of Jerusalem still found their wonted luxuries and 
enjoyments in the palaces of the crowded and joyous city ; and 
by this carelessness of the future while the present was so to 
their taste, they did but reflect, as in a mirror, the like worldly 
condition of their fathers, husbands, brothers. Therefore the 
prophet warns them that a day of trouble is coming, which will 
touch them nearly enough ; — a day of social and domestic, as 
well as of political affliction, when those rich and luxurious 
ladies will be seen clad in sackcloth, alike indicating the po- 
verty into which they have fallen, and the grief with which 
they mourn the various other calamities which war, and its 
attendant famine, have brought into their once prosperous 
homes. But, agaiu, the promise follows close on the threatening : 
these woes may last for a long and indefinite time (as the word 
rendered c for ever ' properly implies) ; but at last e the spirit 
will be poured on the nations from on high ; ' the whole land 
shall be fruitful with righteousness, and with peace the effect of 
righteousness; and the wife and the mother, no longer c care- 
less,' but having found the blessedness of trusting in the true 
source of peace, shall again know, after a better manner than 
before, what it is to ( dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in 
quiet resting-places.' Yet they must expect this blessing in 
the midst of humiliations, and on condition of much patient 
labour ; they must be ready to sow — nay, if need be, to reap 
— the seed of repentance, and faith, and of a new life, while 
the storm is still beating down all their former worldly pro- 
sperity. 

The fact, that this prediction of the impending destruction of 
Jerusalem, has been handed down to us by Isaiah, or his dis- 
ciples, though they knew that it was not fulfilled ; and that they 
have themselves taken care to assure us that it was not fulfilled 
by any event of their own day ; shows clearly that they had 
little notion that prophecy was the literal prediction of such 
events, and still less that such literal coincidence between pre- 



ISAIAH XXXIII.: THE GREAT SPOILER SPOILED. 263 



diction and event, was the test ol the speaker's words being 
a true message from God. 

Chapter xxxiii. As the conclusion to this series of woes 
against the various classes whose sins had brought the Assyrian 
invasion upon the country as God's appropriate instrument of 
punishment, succeeds the prophet's triumphant denunciation 
of still fuller woe upon the great spoiler himself. He has 
reached the very climax of his power, and no longer conceals his 
ultimate designs against Judah: and the baffled ambassadors of 
Hezekiah return to their master to report with weeping, that 
Sennacherib indeed had taken the tribute and presents with 
which they hoped to purchase his departure, but was not the 
less actively pressing the siege of the fortresses in the south of 
J udah, which were falling one after another into his hands ; 
that his hordes of barbarian cavalry were sweeping the whole 
country, so that it was no longer possible for the peasant to 
work in the fields, nor for the traveller to pass along the high 
roads * ; and that it was now his avowed intention to carry out 
the complete policy of Assyrian conquest, by transporting the 
native inhabitants to some other country, which had suffered 
the like subjugation, and of which its natives would in turn 
supply their place. 

This, says the prophet, is the very crisis for which we had to 
wait, morning after morning : the Egyptian alliance, the dip- 
lomacy of Shebna, the humiliation and submission of Hezekiah, 
have alike proved in vain : all hope of help from man is past, 
and therefore God's time is come; the Lord of the nation 
must, and will, keep His covenant now, which He made with 
Abraham and his seed for for a thousand generations : — 

Now will I rise, saith the Lord ; 

Now will I be exalted ; now will I lift up myself. 

* " The villages and the Arab tribes had not suffered less than the towns- 
people. The pasha was accustomed to give instructions to those who were 
sent to collect money, in three words, " Go, destroy, eat" (pillage) ; and his 
agents were not generally backward in entering into the spirit of them. 
The tribes who had been attacked and plundered, were retaliating upon 
caravans and travellers, or laying waste the cultivated parts of the pashalic. 
The villages were deserted, and the roads were little frequented and very 
insecure." — Layard's Nineveh and its Remains^ vol. i. ch. 2. 



264 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



And so signal will be the manifestation of God's power and 
presence in the destruction of this enemy, that even the sinners 
and the hypocrites in Zion will be conscience-stricken by it, 
and be made to know in their hearts, that to fall into the hands 
of the living and holy Lord is more to be dreaded than to 
come under the power of Sennacherib ; but the righteous, on 
the other hand, will feel and know that he can dwell with the 
devouring fire, for it is a fire of love, and not of wrath, to him ; 
and to him, relying wholly on that love, and living according to 
its law, the deliverance from Sennacherib will be the symbol of 
his spiritual security. In the day of trouble he has a high and 
strong fortress, which no enemy can scale, and where neither 
bread nor water will fail ; and the day of deliverance will soon 
follow, to restore him to the light of God's countenance, and 
the blessings of His kingdom, — just as the inhabitants of Jeru- 
salem would, when the siege was raised, see their king Heze- 
kiah again in the robes of state which he had now laid aside for 
sackcloth or armour, or recovered from the sickness which had 
perhaps already attacked him ; and would be able to go abroad 
at will into the country, from which they were now shut up 
within the walls and closed gates of Jerusalem.* Then they 
will look back on the past terror, when they were called on to 
pay the tribute-money, which was, if possible, to buy off the 
foreigners whose harsh and unintelligible tongue was heard 
reckoning its amount, or counting the towers which still stood 
between them and their booty ; — as when Kab-shakeh appeared 
under the walls, and summoned them to surrender. To the 
present confusion in which the land is involved, shall succeed, 
not only peace, but a restoration of their national unity. Of 
this the national festivals were the symbols, because they 
brought the several tribes together from all parts of the king- 
dom, and based these occasions of meeting for pleasure or busi- 
ness, upon a united national worship, which recognised the 
Lord of each man and tribe as the Founder and Head of the 

* " Ergo omnis longo solvit se Teucria luctu ; 
Panduntur portae ; juvat ire, et Dorica castra 
Desertosque videre locos, littusque relictum. 
Hie Dolopum manus, hie ssevus tendebat Achilles." 

Virg. JSn. ii. 26. 



ISAIAH XXXIV., XXXV. : THEIR SUBJECT NOT EDOM. 265 



Commonwealth ; as the Lawgiver and the Judge ; and as the 
King, in the Majesty of whose person the legislative and execu- 
tive, the civil and ecclesiastical functions met, as in something 
greater than any. Only in the Divine King, and not in any 
one of His earthly and finite representatives, could this union of 
all characters in a single person be fitly made. 

Among the images which crowd the concluding verses of 
this chapter, we may perhaps, without fancifulness, distinguish 
an under-current of thoughts suggested by the circumstances 
of the times at which this prophecy was delivered : the promised 
6 quiet ' seems to point to the existing commotion ; the * taber- 
nacle which shall not be taken down,' reminds us, not only of 
the fast-founded temple which had replaced the tabernacle, and 
become the fixed centre of their f solemnities,' but also of the 
tents of Sennacherib's hosts now blackening * the valleys round 
J erusalem, but soon to be swept away ( like the thistle-down 
before the whirlwind;' the s broad rivers and streams' suggest 
the thought that though Hezekiah's precautions would have 
secured the absolutely necessary supply of water for the be- 
leagured city, they felt the w T ant of that abundance of it which 
is still more grateful in an Eastern climate than in our own : 
while the promise that e the inhabitant should no longer say, 
T am sick,' favours the conjecture that the illness of Hezekiah 
may have been one instance of the disease which usually attends 
on the confinement and discomforts of a city shut up against an 
enemy in the field. Numerous other points of poetical and 
philosophical interest will occur to the reader, with or without 
the help of the commentators ; not the least of which is the 
evangelical prophet's anticipation of Him who saith to the 
sick man, 6 Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.' 

Chapters xxxiv. xxxv. In 2 Chronicles, xxviii. 16, 17. we 
read that in the reign of Ahaz, tf the Edomites smote Judah and 
carried away captives,' and that this was one of the motives for 
the fatal application to Assyria for protection. This inroad was, 
no doubt, like that of the Philistines, a revolt against the au- 
thority which in the reigns of Uzziah and Jotham, as of the 

* Then, as now, made of black camels' or goats' hair. See the accounts 
of Modern Travellers ; and Canticles, i. 5. 



266 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



other stronger kings, kept this half-civilised race in a tributary 
state ; and we hardly needed to find ' Huduma,' like Ashdod and 
Beth- Amnion, among the list of the countries whose kings, ac- 
cording to Sennacherib's annals (already referred to) brought 
him e their accustomed tribute,' after his conquest of Phenicia, 
to authorize our extending to Edom the supposition that it, as 
well as Philistia and Moab, suffered more or less at this period 
from the Assyrians, and submitted again to dependence on 
Judah, when Hezekiah's power was re-established after the 
overthrow of Sennacherib. Still I think most readers will feel 
that to refer this prophecy (as Grotius and some others do) to 
such a series of events, is not satisfactory : and that it was a 
just consciousness of the inadequacy of this interpretation which 
led Cyril and Theodoret to explain it of the destruction of Jeru- 
salem and the Jewish commonwealth; the rabbis to believe 
that it predicted the downfall of Christian, the protestants, that 
of Papal, Rome ; and other commentators to find in it threat- 
enings of the general destruction of the enemies of the Church, 
of the overthrow of anti- Christ, or even of some anti-Christian 
power hereafter to rise up in ancient Idumea.* All indicate a 
sense of the gravity of the prophecy, beyond what the name of 
Edom can sustain : and — while the greater part of what is true in 
the feeling is brought into its proper light, by the recognition 
that the prophet is the enunciator of universal laws, which his 
cotemporaries were to apply to the events of their own day, and 
the following generations to read more clearly by help of the 
illustration which those events had afforded, — I believe the 
question, What, then, was the specific event to which the 
chapters before us allude ? is most simply and most satifactorily 
answered by saying, that it is the overthrow of the power of 
Sennacherib. The use of Edom as a mystical name for the 
Assyrian domination, is in accordance with the other instances 
of the kind which I have referred to on chapter xxv. 10. and 
throws light on them, as they do on it ; the general resemblance 
of this prophecy to that of chapters xiii. xiv. ; its promises ex- 
pressed under the image of ransomed captives returning through 
the deserts which separate Judea from Babylonia; and not 



* Alexander, on the passage. 



THE OVERTHROW OF SENNACHERIB. 



267 



least its place in the book ; all point to this, as Isaiah's own 
meaning. If it were necessary to find a reason for his selection 
of this particular type, we might do so in the connection between 
the image of the great sacrifice and the thought of the countless 
flocks of Edom. 

The Day of Judgement, in which the Lord gives His decision 
in the long-pending controversy between Zion, the Kingdom of 
Righteousness, and Assyria, the Kingdom of Force, is come : 
and the Judge of all the earth summons the nations to hear His 
sentence. It is against the king of mere power, and against 
the nations themselves, in as far as they have taken mere power 
to be their law and their god, and are serving in its armies. It 
is a sentence of death, of extermination of the enemies of God 
and man, who are to be made a sin-offering to God's justice, 
that so righteousness may be re-established in the world. Their 
land shall be soaked with blood : the fire and smoke of that 
altar shall be like the fire and smoke of Sodom and Go- 
morrah: the walls of its cities shall be levelled by the 'line 
of confusion and the plummet of emptiness : ' to its heredi- 
tary nobles shall succeed families of wild beasts and birds, which 
shall enter into regular possession, generation after generation, 
and hold their courts in the desolate palaces : the Lord Him- 
self parcels out the land among these invaders, and registers the 
inheritance of each family (as Joshua did for the children of 
Israel *), in order that each may be secured in it for ever. And, 
then follows the ( recompense ' of Judah, whose condition the 
prophet implies, though he beautifully abstains from asserting 
in detail, to have been much that which is now coming on her 
enemies. The contrast between Edom wholly possessed by 
wild animals, and Judah with its human inhabitants restored to 
their national and religious privileges, is very poetical. In the last 
chapter every thing was ferine — patriarchs, inheritances, palaces, 
genealogies : in this (xxxv.), even the earth is human — breaks 
into shouts of joy, while the forests and fields assist in the trium- 
phal return of the Divine King at the head of His people. The 
reader will judge, according to his own taste and feeling of the 
laws of poetic imagination, whether these images only present a 
picture of the general and complete change from desolation to 

* Johsua, xviii. 8, 9, 10. 



268 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



prosperity : or whether he will say, with Vitringa, that c the 
glory of Lebanon/ which consisted in its cedars and other great 
trees, points to faithful teachers, pastors, and princes ; w 7 hile 
c the excellency of Carmel ' with its fruit-bearing slopes, and of 
Sharon with the numerous flocks and herds which fed in its 
pleasant pastures of grass and flowers, represent the people of 
the Church and nation. In the prospect of this deliverance, 
the hands now falling from the attitude of prayer or of action, 
the knees now tottering for lack of firm faith and hope, and the 
hearts now flurried and impatient from fear, may regain 
strength ; the Lord Himself is coming to save, and in that day 
the blind and deaf will see and hear, and the lame and dumb 
will, not only recover their powers, but use them with delight. 
The mirage — the Hebrew word is that still used by the Arabs — 
shall become a real lake ; and springs shall break out in the dry, 
sandy desert, — yet not merely to serve the purpose of providing 
the jackals with marshy haunts, but in order to supply men and 
women — the returning captives — with water on their road.* 

The desert is naturally pathless as well as barren ; but in 
the day of this universal regeneration, the faint track through 
the sands shall be replaced by a solid, embanked causeway, 
which shall not only be there, but be actually used ; as seems 
to be meant by the words, c A highway shall be there, and a 
way.' Highways are among the characteristic features of 
civilisation in a country, since they are the means of regular 
and easy communication between the opposite parts, and espe- 
cially of all with the capital : but in times of foreign invasion 
they fall first into the power of the enemy, and are most 
completely deserted by the inhabitants — c the highways are un- 
occupied, and the travellers walk through by-ways : ' f and in 
Judea, or any other country where wild beasts still exist, these 
keep aloof from the roads, as long as they are kept open by 
traffic ; but re-appear in them if unfrequented, as in the story of 
the old prophet who met the lion on the way from Bethel. 
And this high road shall not only be so well marked and made, 
that the most ignorant and inexperienced shall keep his way 

* See Mr. Layard's curious account of the Mesopotamian marshes. — 
Nineveh and Babylon, chap. xxiv. 

f Judges, v. 6. Compare the note at page 263. above. 



RETURN OF THE RANSOMED CAPTIVES. 



269 



there without difficulty, but neither shall it be appropriated by 
the unclean heathens, nor stopped by any roaring lion, — any 
Sennacherib, or spiritual archetype of Sennacherib. It shall 
be called, for it shall really be, e the way of holiness,' the road 
set apart for the use of the Lord's own chosen and consecrated 
people, whom He has redeemed and brought back from bondage : 
it shall be entirely for those. And here again the reader may 
choose whether he will, with Vitringa and others, explain this 
way — f the old path, the good way in which ye shall find rest 
for your souls,' * — to be the 6 canon of faith and practice,' em- 
bodied in the creeds, sacraments, and other formularies and 
symbols, as the ways, the methods, by which we go forward to 
perfection, going up to the city and presence of God, and to 
communion with Him ; or whether He will say, less definitely, 
but not less forcibly, with Gill f, that it is 'a way cast up by 
sovereign grace, which is raised above the mire and dirt of sin, 
and carries over it and from it.' 

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, 
And shall come to Zion with songs, 
And everlasting joy upon their heads : — 

Of the wonted processions in which kings, village communities, 
and private persons, went up to the temple at the great feasts, 
or on other occasions of national or personal thanksgiving after 
a harvest or a victory, a sickness or a return from captivity, 
I have lately spoken. So I have of that habit of poets, and 
of none more than Isaiah, of preferring manifold to single 
images, which may here authorise us to take all :£, rather than 
any one, of the commentators' explanations of the phrase ( ever- 
lasting joy upon their heads.' Allusions to the crowns of the 
king, the priest, and the bridegroom §, and at the same time to 
the practice of anointing their heads, and the heads of persons 
on other festive occasions, with oil ||, are quite compatible with 
the thought that the joy expresses itself in the countenance, or 
even that it is figured as a radiance of glory about the heads of 

* Jeremiah, vi. 16. f Quoted by Alexander. 

% Except, indeed, that of Forerius given by Alexander. 

§ Canticles, iii. 11. 

|| Compare Psalm xlv. 7. ; Eccl. ix. 8.; Isaiah, lxi. 3. 



270 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the redeemed ones. We may, however, notice, with Vitringa, 
the clear reference, in the passages just quoted, to oil as the 
symbol of gladness : oil, he goes on to say, represents the Holy 
Spirit ; and it is the pouring out of this upon the redeemed, 
who are returning to enter into communion with the Lord in 
His Church, that the prophet speaks. Here, as so constantly, 
Vitringa's comments want nothing, but a more distinct recog- 
nition that Isaiah's words were full of spiritual meaning to the 
pious Jews of his own day, and in relation to the then Zion 
and Church, and were felt by them to be so. 

The more than usually trivial arguments against the genuine- 
ness of these two chapters, would hardly deserve even the pass- 
ing notice which I here give them, if there had been no un- 
avowed motive for the criticism, and no subsequent use to be 
made of its conclusions. But the reader must keep his eyes 
open to the fact, that if he here consents to abandon positive for 
conjectural criticism, he will inevitably prejudge, and without 
the evidence, the coming question of the authorship of the last 
twenty-six chapters of this Book. Positive criticism, such as he 
would be ashamed not to apply to any other book but the Bible, 
will tell him that the prophecy before us is by Isaiah, and in 
his best manner, whether we look at the poetic unity, vigour, 
sublimity, beauty of the composition ; at the high moral, poli- 
tical, and religious tone of thought and feeling ; or at the special 
direction which these take : while the speculative criticism offers 
him an array of such hypotheses as that these two chapters do 
not make one whole ; that their style is diffuse and verbose ; 
that they are full of extravagant expressions of revengeful ma- 
lice ; the work of a writer long after the times of Isaiah ; and 
composed by him as a sort of summary of chapters xl. to lxvi., 
which are to be ascribed to another unknown author. Let the 
true student examine the case thoroughly for himself. 



ISAIAH XXXVI., XXXVII. : HISTORICAL N CREATIVE. 271 



CHAPTER XX. 

ISAIAH XXXVI., XXXVII.: HISTORICAL EVENTS OF SENNACHERIb's INVASION 

AND RETREAT HIS. LETTER — HOW ANSWERED. — UNCONSCIOUS GENIUS 

IN THE NARRATIVE. — - RAB-SHAKEH's THEOLOGY. ISAIAH'S INSPIRATION. 

4 THE INCARNATE WRATH OF GOD.' — ZIOn's DEFIANCE. THE ' SIGN ' 

OF THE SPONTANEOUS CROPS. — THE DESTROYING ANGEL. SETHOS DE- 
LIVERED BY VULCAN. VALUE OF SENNACHERIB^S ANNALS, IF ESTA- 
BLISHED THEIR ALTERED TONE AFTER THIS YEAR. GERMAN WAR OF 

FREEDOM. HISTORY TEACHES A BELIEF IN PROVIDENCE. — NIEBUHR. 

GROTE. 

There has been much discussion as to whether the historical 
narrative in the following chapters, or its slightly varying coun- 
terpart in the 2nd Book of Kings, is the original ; or whether 
both are taken from some third work now lost, and which may 
also have supplied the materials for the different account of the 
same events in the 2nd Book of Chronicles ; and what was 
the share of Isaiah himself in the actual or supposed narratives. 
We are told * that he wrote a complete history of the reign of 
Uzziah ; and if he wrote that of Hezekiah also, it would be 
quite intelligible that the main part of this should, on the one 
hand, be incorporated into the Book of Kings, and on the other, 
into this book of his own prophecies, with such omissions and 
amplifications as the purposes of each required, The opinion 
that this was done in the latter case by some compiler and editor 
of the prophet's writings, has its advocates : but I persuade my- 
self that, in proportion to the reader's study of the book as a 
whole, and as we have it, he has seen indications of a unity of 
design in the arrangement of the several prophecies, and of the 
various pieces of narrative connecting them ; and has con- 
sequently found that arrangement so interesting and important, 
for the light it throws on each part, and for the epic character 
it gives to the whole, as to be worthy of Isaiah himself, and 



* 2 Chron. xxvi. 22. 



272 



HEBEEW POLITICS. 



perhaps above the reach of any of his successors of whom we 
know anything. 

We have also here again some obscurity as to certain details 
of the events now taking place ; and of which these narratives, 
with the yet imperfectly read inscriptions, are the remaining 
records. We may not be able to pronounce positively whether 
Sennacherib was now on his way to Egypt ; whether he had 
actually taken, or was still baffled by the walls of Lachish and 
Libnah ; whether Rab-shakeh withdrew the troops which had 
accompanied him to Jerusalem, when he himself returned to 
Sennacherib's head-quarters ; or whether — because he was only 
an ambassador, and Tartan and Ivabsaris the generals, or for 
any other reason — they were left behind to begin the siege ; 
whether it was the destruction of this detached army, by plague 
already begun within the walls of Jerusalem, or by some more 
sudden catastrophe, that compelled Sennacherib to fly to his 
own land ; nor decide other like questions, for and against which 
much has been, and may be, said. But the careful examination 
of the alternatives (for which I refer the reader to the commen- 
tators themselves) enables us to get all the general light we 
require for a distinct view of the great political features of the 
period : though this examination will show us that there are 
dark patches of shadow, or undefined marks, where we had 
hoped to make out specific forms on a nearer approach, still we 
find that, on again retiring to the right point of distance for 
seeing the whole as the picture it is, and is meant to be, it tells 
its story quite well; and that we may learn from it all we need 
to know. We see that in the regular advance of the Assyrian 
power, it had reached the point at which Sennacherib could 
cease to temporise with Judah, and might proceed completely 
to absorb the tributary state into the empire. The kingdom 
of Samaria had already followed the fate of Damascus in this 
respect : the taking of Ashdod had not only opened the road to 
Egypt, but also turned the position of Judah : the plunder of 
No-Ammon had sharpened the appetites of the northern in- 
vaders for new campaigns and conquests : and if Sennacherib 
thought it well to try and intimidate Hezekiah and his people 
into surrendering cities, which even Tartan himself would have 
had difficulty in taking until they were starved out, we may 



Sennacherib's letter: how answered. 273 

infer from the insolent way in which he still avows his ultimate 
intentions if they did surrender, that he really had no fear for 
the result, even though he should be obliged to fight Tirhakeh, 
with Judah unconquered and assisting the Egyptians. The 
justness of the belief which (as we learn from Herodotus) was 
held by the Egyptians, as well as by the Hebrews, that nothing 
but an interposition of God's hand could at this moment have 
broken the great Assyrian power, is confirmed by this conduct 
of Sennacherib and his messenger, no less than by the despair 
of help from human counsels, or arms, which Hezekiah manifests 
on receiving the report of the message, and the letter by which 
it was afterwards followed. There is some truth in the obser- 
vation, though it may have been made scoffingly, that Heze- 
kiah's character on the present occasion resembles that of David 
in its devotion more than in its energy ; for the powers of the 
Hebrew monarchy, and its reigning king, were too feeble to 
resist that incarnation of universal despotism, if they could not 
obtain a form and degree of support which David did not need 
for the assertion of the independence and superiority of his 
kingdom, among the surrounding nations. It was true, as 
Sennacherib boasted, that a power had arisen against which 
nation after nation had found its faith, and institutions, and 
arms, unable to make any head : and if the utter destruction 
wdiich had come upon Ephraim, no less than upon the peoples 
and kings whose names the Assyrian recites in his letter, exactly 
in the fashion in which he recited, and we now read, them on 
the obelisks or bulls at Nineveh, was not to fall now on Judah 
also, it must be by the help of a stronger hand than had inter- 
fered for any of them. The conviction that the Lord of Israel 
was strong enough, and no less willing, to keep His covenant by 
defending the nation against all its enemies, had no doubt sup- 
ported Hezekiah hitherto : but it w r ould have been insufficient, 
in this moment, to meet the terrible feeling that he was now in 
the actual presence and power of the representative of irresisti- 
ble arbitrary force, unless a higher truth had come to sustain 
this lower one, and he had realised (as men only do realise in 
some extremity of their own helplessness) that there was an Ab- 
solute Will retaining the mastery over that irresistible force, 
however crushing it might seem ; and that the Lord of Israel 

T 



274 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



who ( dwelt between the cherubims,' was Himself the God, the 
only God, of all the kingdoms of the earth, and so of this 
Assyrian kingdom among the rest. And then we see how this 
truth, which the pious Hezekiah had known and acknowledged 
before, but which now came to him with all the reality of life 
and death, begets a likeness to itself in the mind which it in- 
forms ; for just as the idea of, and faith in, the Lord of the 
nation, expands into, yet remains a living part of, the higher 
consciousness that He is the Lord who made and still rules the 
heavens and earth, so Hezekiah's patriotic interest in, and prayer 
for, the preservation of his own people, expands itself into a 
desire for the honour of God, as its ultimate object : 6 Now, 
therefore, O Lord our God, save us from his hand, that all the 
kingdoms of the earth may know that thou art the Lord, even 
Thou only/ 

"We are so familiar from childhood with these Scripture nar- 
ratives, and they are so unpretending in their form, that it is 
usually only after some distinct effort of examination by help of 
commentaries or lexicons, that we notice (as we do then notice) 
the marks which they abound with, of unconscious genius in 
the selection of the really characteristic points of the story.* 
The short peremptory letter of Sennacherib, not only brings 
out the acts of Hezekiah which we have just been considering, 
but also the more vulgar insolence of Rab-shakeh, who will not 
give Hezekiah the title of king at all, while he rings the changes 
upon c my master, the great king, the king of Assyria.' And 
again the address of Rab-shakeh to Eliakim and his fellow- 
ministers, is artfully differenced from that in which, in defiance 
of their request, he appeals to the men on the wall: with the 
latter he makes the surrender a question of mere selfish con- 
sideration, how to escape the famine which is likely to accompany 
the siege, and to have plenty to eat and drink thereafter ; while 
to the ministers of state he urges their utter want of power to 
resist, and, moreover, condescends to argue (on their own 
ground as he supposes) the theological question, whether Heze- 

* The official report by the centurion of his irregular proceedings, the 
politic speeches and conduct of Paul, and the oration of Tertullian, are 
among the instances, of which the Book of Acts is perhaps fuller than any 
other. 



eab-shakeh's theology. 



275 



kiah can hope for the support of a God whose altars he has 
taken away, with a patronising scepticism which singularly re- 
sembles the style in which the sceptic in our own day often un- 
dertakes to enlighten some one who has spent years in the study 
and practice of the Christian creed and life, as to the conse- 
quences of his own belief, — wholly unconscious that his talk is 
as much beside the mark as if he were to set right a Newton or 
a Laplace, though himself unacquainted with the first elements 
of physical science. The theology and the politics of both 
Rab-shakeh's speeches, and his inability to understand that his 
hearers were actuated by a sentiment of patriotism, as well as 
by those other interests or superstitions which he thinks he 
meets so cleverly, may be compared and contrasted with Heze- 
kiah's address to his people, and their reception of it *, as well 
as with his prayer to God, and his message to Isaiah. 

I am as unable as those before me, to suggest any reason why 
the communications between Hezekiah and Isaiah were carried 
on by message, upon the occasions specified in the text. The 
dispute whether verse 7. of chapter xxxvii. is a miraculous pre- 
diction, or an interpolation after the event, may be superseded 
by the consideration that men would not differ from the brutes 
that perish, if they had no power of anticipating the future 
from their knowledge of the past and present. The most 
foolish man has something of this power, as to those events in 
which he is vitally interested, though he may exercise it rather 
as an instinct than as a deliberate act of reason ;' and much more 
the wise man. A man with such large € discourse of reason,' 
with such original and such cultivated genius as Isaiah, is, in- 
deed, God's most wonderful creation ; but I cannot think it 
does honour to the Creator to suppose that the Hebrew prophet 
— being such as he was, and acquainted not only with the 
general laws which govern the rise and fall of despotisms, and 
prescribe small interval between a tyrant's failure in the field 
and violent death at home, but also with many details of Sen- 
nacherib's position and circumstances unknown to us — ■ could 
not have predicted the fate of the Assyrian in the terms he does, 
without some special suspension of the ordinary, regular, work- 



* Quoted in page 220. above. 

T 2 



276 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ing of the prophet's inspired mind. That Isaiah was inspired, 
that these utterances of his human wisdom and knowledge were 
all originated, sustained, and directed by the actually present, 
indwelling, Holy Ghost, and that the daily, hourly, habitual, 
prayer of faith was the means of keeping up this communion of 
the prophet with his God, I am anxious to assert in the most 
explicit words I can find ; and this, not to prove my own ortho- 
doxy to myself or others, but as a point of positive (as distin- 
guished from hypothetical) criticism, which must be recognised 
to be a fact, before any effective literary and philosophical exa- 
mination of Isaiah's writings is possible : and whether such a 
recognition of Isaiah's inspiration is most hindered by the hypo- 
thesis of a miracle, or that of an interpolation, it w T ould be dif- 
ficult to decide. And that each hypothesis is opposed to the 
facts, no less than to the spirit, of the narrative, will appear if 
we compare the historical detail of Sennacherib's overthrow and 
death as given, after the event, in verses 36, 37, 38. of chapter 
xxxvii., with the general expressions of Isaiah both in his first 
short answer to Hezekiah, and in the longer rhythmical one : for 
a miraculous communication, whether real or forged, should 
surely have contained those details, in order effectually to answer 
its purpose ; and if Isaiah had supposed that his first words did 
convey such an oracular prediction, he would hardly have 
omitted to repeat and dwell upon them in his subsequent pro- 
phecy, which he expressly calls c the word which the Lord hath 
spoken concerning Sennacherib, king of Assyria : ' — unless, in- 
deed, we suppose that on both occasions the prophet was a mere 
automaton emitting articulate sounds. 

When Rab-shakeh asserts, in his master's name, f the Lord 
said unto me, Go up against this land and destroy it,' we are re- 
minded both of Timour's declaration that he was the incarnate 
wrath of God, and also of the less religious belief of Napoleon, 
and other military despots, in their destiny. Yet Sennacherib's 
self-confidence is essentially atheistic ; and is in this respect in 
accordance with all we know of military despotisms, modern no 
less than ancient, when they are at their climax : the old forms 
of worship will be retained, like the old forms of government, 
where they do not interfere with, or are even useful instruments 
of, the despot ; but when the physical force he wields is become 



isaiah xxxvu. 22—29.: zion's defiance. 277 



the only real law, and no appeal remains from it to duties and 
rights, nor to an Absolute Justice the source of these, he him- 
self becomes — for is he not ? — the god, or rather anti-god of 
those he rules. But the confidence of the virgin daughter of 
Zion in the strength of her Lord, and her consequent scornful 
defiance, are not less bold and peremptory than the Assyrian's : 
and the fact that her Lord makes her cause His own, and that 
He has been insulted in her person, makes it the more certain 
that He will answer Hezekiah's prayer, and avenge His own 
honour. 

It is probable that the word f virgin 5 here, as in the usage of 
other languages and times, implies that the city is impregnable : 
and that Lebanon here, as elsewhere*, stands for the land of 
Israel, having been possibly suggested by the thought of the 
success with which the Assyrians employed their cavalry in a 
country where it might have been expected to prove only an 
encumbrance, so that they seemed as if they could literally take 
the precipitous and wooded heights of Lebanon itself with their 
multitude of chariots and horses : the tall cedars and choice fir- 
trees, the border-heights, and the garden-like, or fruit-bearing, 
forests, are images, with more or less special allusion, of the 
princes and people, the temple, the cities, and the cultivated 
country of Judea. Dr. Alexander well observes, that the force 
of the words of this and the next (24th and 25th) verses is much 
greater, if we preserve the distinction of tenses in the original : 
the Assyrian has scaled the impregnable mountains and forests, 
he will take actual possession of all that he finds therein ; he 
has led his vast armies through the great deserts between Baby- 
lonia and Egypt, digging and drinking water, and he will tread 
the streams of Egypt dry, like so many puddles, — the drought 
and the flood being equally under his control. f There is 

* Jerem. xxii. 23. ; Ezek. xvii. 3. 12. ; Habak. ii, 17. ; Zechar. xi. 1. 
f " Cum cesserit omnis 

Obsequiis natura meis ? Subsidere nostris 
Sub pedibus montes ; arescere vidimus amnes : — 
Fregi Alpes, galeisque Padum victricibus hausi." 

Claudian's Speech of Alaric : Be Bello Getic. 526. 
" Credimus altos 
Defecisse amnes, epotaque flumina Medo." 

Juv. Sat. x. 176. Quoted by Lowthand Gesenius. 



278 



HEBKEW POLITICS. 



a like mixture of symbol and fact in the one verse and the 
other. 

Such is the boast which Sennacherib has ventured to utter 
against the Holy One of Israel. Observe the emphasis of the 
expression : the Holy One of Israel is a Being whose Majesty no 
one violates with impunity, and who, if He be not sanctified 
by men, sanctifies Himself in judgments.* Isaiah had, at an 
earlier stage of the Assyrian conquests f , referred to these, we 
know habitual, boasts, and had replied to them that the con- 
querors were merely the instruments for carrying out God's 
predetermined and pre-arranged plan : and he makes the same 
reply again now, only that there he dwelt on the corrective dis- 
cipline to which Zion was to be submitted according to that 
plan, while here he assumes that the discipline has wrought its 
work, and that the scourge is done with. On comparing the 
images in verse 27. with those in verses 30, 33. we see that 
the actual devastation of the cultivated country suggests that 
under-current of thought, which is more or less traceable in all 
poetry ; though the images themselves, in the first verse, are 
those of grass and green crops, which are so feeble as to fall at 
once before the scythe, or even to die of themselves in a few 
weeks ; — nay, to heighten the emphasis, of the still feebler 
weeds which grow up in the chance dust and moisture on the 
housetops, and the corn which is sickly from its root. The 
following threat, of curbing and leading Sennacherib like a brute 
beast, is singularly illustrated by the bas-reliefs of Holwan and 
Khorsabad, which represent prisoners actually led in triumph 
by a hook through the nose and lips. 

The ( sign ' which Isaiah goes on to promise, in terms appa- 
rently made obscure in order to excite consideration, seems best 
explained to mean, that the Assyrian devastations of the open 
country of the Jews had prevented the regular cropping of the 
land, and consequently the regular harvest, for the current year : 
and as the enemy was still in occupation of the country, there 
was no possibility of ploughing and sowing in preparation for 
the next year either ; but the season after that, the prophet con- 

* Compare chapters v. 16., x. 17., xxix. 23. 
f Chapter x. 



ISAIAH XXXVII. SO— 32. : SPONTANEOUS CROrS. 



279 



fidently asserts that they would be able to sow and reap, and 
plant vineyards, and eat the fruit thereof.* The promise is 
thus brought into strict harmony with the previous threat f > 
that c the vintage should fail, and the gathering not come,' for 
a time which we must understand Isaiah there to say would be 
considerable, — whether we understand the e days above a year ' 
of the original to mean ( more than a full year,' or look only at 
the general expressions in the following verses of the passage 
referred to. That what Isaiah meant there, he may have meant 
now, might seem answer enough to the objection, that those 
who give this explanation of the prediction of the loss of two 
harvests, must suppose the prophet to have expected the Assy- 
rian occupation to last much longer than the history shows 
that it did : but the objection itself vanishes, if we recollect 
that the movements of great armies against, and over, a 
country defended by deserts, and mountains, and fortified 
cities ; the political negotiations which preceded and followed 
these movements ; and the recovery of depopulated villages, and 
wasted cornfields and vineyards ; were not events which could 
begin and end within any such short space as it takes to write 
or read of them. Instances of two, and even three crops from 
one sowing are mentioned by Strabo, and are also said to occur 
in California at the present time. 

This sign is analogous in character to those of ( Immanuel ' 
and i Maher-shalal-hash-baz,' as well as to that given to Moses 
at the Burning Bush \ ; and, we may add, to those of the rain- 
bow ; and of the water, and the bread and wine, of the Chris- 
tian sacraments ; and of all other symbols, of which the purpose 
is, not to establish faith in a future miracle because a present 

* Thus the Spartan envoys express their sympathy with the Athenians 
who, in bearing the brunt of the Persian invasion, ' had already been de- 
prived of two harvests : ' where Mr. Grote observes that as this was spoken 
before the invasion of Mardonius, the loss of two crops must mean the loss 
of the harvest of the past summer, together with the seed of the autumn 
immediately following ; and that the advice of Themistocles to his country- 
men, that ' every one should repair his house and attend to sowing his 
ground,' must have been found impracticable in most cases to carry into 
effect during that autumn. — Herod, viii. 142. : Grote's History of Greece 
v. 202. 

-f Isaiah, xxxii. 10. % Exodus, iii. 12. 

t 4 



280 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



one has been wrought, but to supply such an outward and 
visible sign of the accompanying inward spiritual grace, as will, 
from the very constitution of man's being (of soul and body 
united), help him to realise the latter, as he could not do by any 
naked mental effort. And the thing here signified has itself an 
inward and an outward part : for, as the spontaneously sowed 
and multiplied corn and fruit will be the foundation and mate- 
rials of the regular cultivation of the third year, so will the 
deserted villages and farms be replenished with the survivors of 
those who have for the present found refuge within the walls of 
Jerusalem ; and both the one and the other will be the types of 
that ( holy seed,' the existence of which in the corrupt nation 
was made known to Isaiah at his first calling to the prophetic 
office, when he was told that he was to watch and wait, with 
the long patience of the husbandman, for the growing up of that 
seed, after the hard ground had been broken up, and the rampant 
weeds rooted out, by the ploughshare of repeated national cala- 
mity. ' The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall do this 

For I will defend this city to save it, saith the Lord, for mine 
own sake, and my servant David's sake.' David was the per- 
sonal representative of the faith and righteousness of the nation, 
in the day that God renewed with him His covenant to continue 
the name and the kingdom of Israel for ever*; and that cove- 
nant God would keep, as long as there were any who in heart 
were of David's race, for their and David's sake : — for their 
faith and righteousness were not the less to be rewarded, because 
these were the free gift of God, and the result of His choosing 
them, and not of their choosing Him. 

I do not attempt to add to the discussion of the questions, 
whether 6 the angel of the Lord,' that minister of His, which 
did His pleasure on the Assyrians, was a tempest, a hot wind, 
a pestilence, or some other of those powers of nature which, 
when employed by God's providence, are usually called His 
angels by the Hebrews ; whether there is any such improba- 
bility in the more explicit statement in the Book of Kings, — 
that this great multitude were destroyed in a single night — as 
demands that it should be restricted by the terms of the ac- 



* 2 Samuel, vii. 12, 13. 



ISA. xxxviii. 33 — 38. : setiios delivered by vulcan. 281 

count before us, and of that in the Chronicles ; and whether the 
Egyptian record of the same catastrophe, as preserved by He- 
rodotus, throws any further light upon it. A positive deter- 
mination of them is not at all necessary to our substantial 
understanding of the case ; though, of course, every fact of his- 
tory, however minute, may have its value, when ascertained to 
be a fact ; and it is unfortunate that the modern commentators 
on this passage should show so much disposition to bend their 
criticism to a foregone conclusion, orthodox or rationalist. The 
story of Herodotus seems to me erroneously called a transfer of 
the scene of the event to Egypt, and a substitution of the names 
of Sethos and Vulcan for Hezekiah and Jehovah : Sennacherib's 
army was menacing Egypt as well as Judea at the time, if he 
had not already beaten ' the kings of Egypt with the horsemen 
and footmen belonging to the King of Ethiopia, of which the 
numbers could not be counted ;' and a detachment, like that 
sent to Jerusalem, may have appeared at Pelusium : and cer- 
tainly the matter of interest and thankfulness to Sethos was that 
he and his country, not that Hezekiah and the Jews, w r ere 
delivered by the providential destruction of their common ene- 
my. And though we admit as probable, nay certain, that all the 
coatings of the superstition which represented the Egyptian god 
Vulcan as the deliverer, were not the additions of a later priest- 
craft ; though we allow that this was more or less the belief of 
Sethos himself, and that he could not e speak the language of 
Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts,' w T ith that clearness 
of heart and mind with which Isaiah had foretold that the 
Egyptians should ( know the Lord in the day that He sent a 
Saviour to deliver them; ' still the student who has an eye for 
the good, as well as for the evil, of the religions of the world, will 
not fail to distinguish in the narrative of Herodotus, the record 
of a true though imperfect recognition by the Egyptians that 
neither Sennacherib, nor Tirhakeh, but an invisible and divine 
Lord, was the real master of Egypt and its destinies, and that 
this providential deliverance was so clear an instance of His rule, 
that it should awaken a sentiment of piety in every one who 
learnt the story : — is kfjus tls opscov, svas(3r]s £<7tg> 0 * 

* This mention of Sethos, or Zet, by Herodotus, as the cotemporary of 
Sennacherib, and therefore of Tirhakeh, is in favour of those who hold the 



282 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



If the reading of Sennacherib's annals, as to this war, be esta- 
blished, it will relieve the student of Isaiah's prophecies and 
policy, of a certain difficulty. We have hitherto had to make 
out a history of this Assyrian campaign from fragmentary facts 
and allusions ; and the notices in these and the corresponding 
chapters, taken with the account of Herodotus, and the in- 
scription on a temple at Thebes which, according to Wilkin- 
son, records Tirhakeh's successful opposition to Sennacherib, 
indicated the most probable supposition to be that the Assyrian 
king retreated from the Ethiopian, either after sustaining, or 
without waiting for, a battle in the south-west of Judea. And 
then to bring this into harmony with Isaiah's steady denun- 
ciation of the alliance of Israel with Egypt, which might thus 
seem to have succeeded, instead of failing as he predicted, we 
must consider that Sennacherib's boast, that Tirhakeh would 
not be able to help Hezekiah, was well founded when uttered ; 
and that the Ethiopian army would not have ventured to attack 
that of Sennacherib, unless the latter had first been weakened 
by the great and sudden destruction effected in it by the 
immediate hand of God. This would indeed be a sufficient 
fulfilment of the spirit of the prophet's language, rightly under- 
stood ; and we may be quite content if we have no better. 
But it cannot be denied that Sennacherib's own account, that 
he not only fought, but thoroughly beat, the countless hosts of 
Egypt and Ethiopia at Lachish, and executed all the chief 
men among his prisoners at Libnah, suits the prophet's express 
anticipations much better ; while the after abandonment of his 
advantage by Sennacherib meets the requirements of the narra- 
tive of Herodotus, at least as well as the other supposition. 

The revolt of Babylon and of the Medes, and perhaps of 
other dependencies not mentioned in history as these are, con- 
curred to weaken the Assyrian empire of the sword at this 
period; and Sennacherib 6 decamped, departed, returned, re- 
mained at Nineveh,' — a description which has been compared 
to Catiline's abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit, — without troubling 
Judea again. 

Tanitic and Ethiopian dynasties to have been synchronous : M. Bunsen sup- 
poses Sethos to have been put instead of Tirhakeh, by some inadvertence of 
the Greek historian. 



ALTEEED TONE OF SENNACHERIB'S ANNALS. 283 



e Sennacherib's annals do not,' says Colonel Rawlinson, i of 
course allude to a discomfiture produced by pestilence and 
panic; but the summary way in which he closes his account of 
the campaign, merely stating that he returned to Nineveh with 
his spoil, would be alone sufficient to indicate some disaster to 
his army. It is also important to add that he was unable 
during the following year, owing apparently to the severe 
check he had sustained, to undertake any operations of magni- 
tude, and that, so far as has been yet ascertained, he does not 
appear at any subsequent period of his reign to have ventured 
to lead his armies across the Euphrates into Syria. The suppo- 
sition that the murder of Sennacherib by his sons took place 
immediately on his return to Nineveh, merely rests on a passage 
in the apocryphal book of Tobit. The statement in Kings, 
that he returned to Nineveh c and dwelled there,' indicates a 
prolonged reign, and the question is now set definitively at rest 
by our possession of his annals for at least five years subsequent 
to the Jerusalem catastrophe. The events of the fourth year 
of Sennacherib present a marked contrast to the detailed and 
magniloquent descriptions of the preceding periods; they are 
confined to a few meagre lines, and refer exclusively to an 
expedition against the Chaldees, undertaken perhaps in order 
to punish Merodach Baladan for sending ambassadors to Heze- 
kiah, which Sennacherib does not seem even to have conducted 
in person.'* 

I have already shown, at so great length, how the successive 
events of the War of Freedom affected the minds of the more 
thoughtful and religious Germans, that I must here content 
myself with referring the reader to the terms in which Niebuhr 
maintains that there had never, in any age, been a more signal 
manifestation of God's hand, than in their final deliverance 
6 when the need was the sorest, when all human wisdom and 
strength had failed. f The same writer observes, in his Lectures 
on Roman History J, that there are occasional points of time at 
which the whole course of history, and of the fates of nations, is 

* Outline, p. 25. 

f " The hand of God in Prussia's deliverance from a foreign yoke," in 
Niebuhr's Life and Letters, iii. 115. 
% Vol. ii. p. p. 146. 



284 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



decided by some event which does not grow necessarily out of 
previous events, and which a reasonable man can only explain 
by referring to the providence of God. Mr. Grote, on the 
other hand, recognises, but leaves unexplained, such master- 
events of history. He points out, that if Darius had not — 
contrary to probable expectation — delayed the first Persian 
invasion till the Greeks had had twenty years for efficient pre- 
parations, they must have been overwhelmed, and Greece, such 
as it has been to the world, would never have existed ; and he 
draws the general inference, 6 that the history of any nation, 
considered as a sequence of causes and effects affording applicable 
knowledge, requires us to study not merely real events, but 
also imminent contingencies:'* but there he stops. And when 
Niebuhr takes me a step further, and shows me a £ eause afford- 
ing applicable knowledge,' where Mr. Grote only indicated an 
unexplained ' effect,' I must think that Xiebuhr's is the more 
completely positive criticism — criticism which takes scientific 
cognisance of all the facts. I could not hear an explanation 
of the complicated workings of a steam-engine, with its arrange- 
ments for supplying its own water, oiling its own wheels, chang- 
ing vertical to horizontal movements, and so on, and at last 
admit, that when the hand of the ever-watchful engineer did 
occasionally intervene to give the machine some new application, 
or to prevent some hideous crash, this was an inexplicable oc- 
currence — much less pass it in silence, as though its explana- 
tion had no interest to a rational man. 



History of Greece^ iv. 353. 



ISAIAH XXXVIII. : THE SICKNESS OF HEZEKIAH. 285 



CHAPTER XXL 

Is AT AH XXXVIIT. : THE SICKNESS OE HEZEKIAH- — IMPORTANCE OF HIS LIFE TO 

HIS NATION HIS DESIRE OF RECOVERY NOT PURELY SELFISH. — FEAR OF 

DEATH IN OLD TIMES. CHRIST^ RESURRECTION. THE SIGN OF THE SHA- 
DOW ON THE SUN-DIAL. — TWO ACCOUNTS THE COTEMPORARY ONE NOT 

MIRACULOUS. BIBLE TO BE TREATED LIKE OTHER BOOKS. •*— NOT SO 

TREATED BY SCEPTICS. THE HYMN OF HEZEKIAH. 

6 In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death.' — It is said 
that the treatment of plague-boils in the East still cor- 
responds with that prescribed by Isaiah on this occasion; 
and from this, as well as from the other possible allusions 
(already noticed) to the existence of pestilence in Jerusalem 
and in Sennacherib's army, it has been suggested that this 
deadly sickness was the plague; and that it occurred before 
the country was freed from the enemy is the natural inference 
from the words in verse 6., though some commentators maintain 
the other hypothesis. Either way, the absence of any allusion 
to the deliverance in Hezekiah's song, is oue of those facts 
which, in historical documents, are so perpetually contradicting 
our notions of what was likely to have been said or done, and 
which teach us within what narrow limits all deductive criti- 
cisms must be kept, if they are not to become mere speculations 
of the fancy. 

This sickness and recovery of Hezekiah from the gates of 
death, was an event of such national importance as made it 
properly find a place here, as well as in the historical books. For 
the throne of David, as far as we know, was without an heir 
at this moment ; and Hezekiah's death might have been followed 
by some such interregnum, anarchy, and seizure of the crown 
by a soldier, as hastened the downfal of the kingdom of 
Ephraim. Such a failure in the succession, in times of national 



286 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



depression and disorganisation, would be pregnant with evil 
even in England now; and we must remember that in Judea 
then, as in all Eastern and patriarchal governments still, the 
personal character of the hereditary sovereign was of an im- 
portance to the people which it has to a great degree, though 
not utterly, lost in every country of Europe except Russia. 
Let us contrast the character and acts of Hezekiah with those 
of his immediate predecessor and successor, and we shall see of 
what moment it was that the interval by which his reign sepa- 
rated theirs, should be prolonged fifteen years ; and especially 
when the country needed a hand disciplined by experience, and 
guided by faith, to recover it from the moral and material dis- 
organisation into which (as we know from Isaiah's discourses) 
it had fallen during the Assyrian supremacy. And thus this 
crisis in the personal life of Hezekiah — the fact cannot be 
denied, though here, as in so many like cases, our philosophy 
cannot trace out the connection of cause and effect — became 
the type and symbol of the like crisis in the life of the nation : 
it, too, was sick unto death, and was granted a new period of 
life by God, after it was past the help of man. 

And therefore it will rather argue our own low moral stan- 
dard than our understanding of Hezekiah's state of mind, if we 
see nothing but selfishness and weakness in his lamentations at 
the prospect of death selfishness and weakness w T e may find 
there, for in whom are they not found in the hour of extreme 
suffering ? Ever since his accession to the throne, and no 
doubt long before, Hezekiah had been possessed by the idea 
that he was called by the Lord to reform and restore the 
nation : he had been labouring in the work for fourteen years, 
amidst the greatest difficulties ; and now all was to be broken 
off prematurely ; he was neither to be permitted to go on work- 
ing for the natural 1 residue of his years,' nor to hand over a 
finished task to his children, and thus make known to them the 
Lord's truth by his life, as well as by words.* These feelings 
on Hezekiah's part, seem to be recognised in Isaiah's subse- 
quent promise that he should recover : for the promise is from 
( the Lord, the God of David his father,' and involves an 



* Verse 19. 



ISAIAH XXXVIII. 1 — 8. : THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL. 287 

assurance, not only of his own escape from death, but also that 
the city as well as himself should be delivered out of the hand 
of the King of Assyria ; and thus reminds him that his life is 
prolonged, not for his individual merits, not for his individual 
advantage, but because of God's covenant with the house of 
David, and that he may fulfil the duties to which that house 
has been called. If a man has a real work to do in the world, 
he must lament if it is not permitted him to accomplish it : he 
will lament, even though he acquiesces in the absolute will of 
God, and believes that God will accomplish His own good 
design, even more perfectly, through this apparent frustration of 
it by the power of nature and circumstances. Moreover, to the 
saints before the death and resurrection of the Lord, there was 
also a far greater — nay almost entire — obscurity and gloom 
over the future. It is difficult, — perhaps, except for a mo- 
ment, impossible — for us now to realise all they then felt : for 
in our times a man has either made himself too much a creature 
of this world to have very deep thoughts on death, or the dis- 
covery of their depth and darkness has driven him to find light 
and life in the clear hope of the Resurrection which the Gospel 
has made known to us : but we can see from the language of 
Hezekiah, and from the like expressions in some of the Psalms, 
that the holiest men of old could not but look on death as a 
descent into hell ; and therefore, though they believed that 
God was there also, they shrunk instinctively from it, and 
desired rather to serve Him in the land of the living. We 
may contrast Hezekiah's language on this occasion with 
that of St, Paul in his Epistles to the Philippians, and to 
Timothy. 

The corresponding narrative in the Second Book of Kings 
relates the going back of the shadow on the degrees or steps 
of Ahaz as a miracle ; but the account before us falls Avithin 
the ordinary laws of Providence and nature, unless we are 
bound to interpret it by the former. For reasons such as I 
have urged on other like points throughout this volume, I think 
we are not so bound : and that on comparing the two docu- 
ments (that in the Chronicles is so brief as to throw no farther 
light on the question) by the ordinary methods of historical 
criticism, we may see that though both the writers believed in 



288 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the possibility of miracles, which in their minds were not sepa- 
rated by any marked division from what we now call provi- 
dential events, yet the cotemporary historian does not describe 
the occurrence in terms that exclude any explanation but that 
of miracle, because he described simply and honestly what he 
or his informant saw, and which in fact was not a miracle : 
whereas the other, living 200 years or more after the event, 
introduces the miraculous element into the account by a few 
transpositions and variations which to him — to whom the 
miracle is the most obvious, nay the only conceivable, means of 
understanding the original documents — seem a mere matter 
of literary compilation and explanation. He is just as simple 
and honest here, as when he is abstracting the most ordinary 
fact from the mass of Chronicles before him ; and as uncon- 
scious of the change he has wrought, as are the various com- 
mentators who, down to the present day, take for granted that 
the statements in the Kings are a mere supplement to those in 
Isaiah, without any difference in kind. If we prefer to believe 
that verses 21. and 22. of the chapter (xxxviii.) before us are a 
part of the original document added by the author at the end, 
when he saw that he had omitted the facts they mention, in the 
proper part of the narrative, the whole occurrence will appear to 
have been this : — that Hezekiah being dangerously ill, Isaiah, 
under an impulse which he, like Socrates, recognised to be from 
God, but which directed the Hebrew prophet what to do, while 
it only admonished the Greek philosopher what to abstain from, 
went to warn the king that he must prepare for inevitable 
death; and then left him in great trouble at the declaration, 
and in earnest prayer that his life might be spared. In this 
grief and prayer, Isaiah both as a patriot and as a personal 
friend, fully sympathised : and being soon convinced that the 
Lord had heard their prayers, and that he was empowered 
to promise Hezekiah recovery instead of death, he returned to 
announce this new 6 word of the Lord ; ' and to prescribe the 
medical means which were to be employed in faith of the result. 
Hezekiah's grief, as we see in the accompanying record of it, 
had expressed itself in lamentations that he was cut off from 
4 seeing the Lord,' that is, worshipping Him in His temple at 
Jerusalem ; and Isaiah's promise was couched in the form of an 



THE SIGN NOT A MIRACLE. 



289 



assurance that he should go up to the temple again in two or 
three days, as we should say.* Hezekiah asked for 6 a sign 'that 
the promise would be fulfilled ; and then Isaiah referred to a 
phenomenon which, by a providential coincidence, occurred at 
the time, but which we know, though they could not, to involve 
no suspension of the laws of nature. f Dr. Alexander's literal 
translation of the text (which I give, not only because of his 
accurate scholarship, but also because he is entirely in favour 
of the miraculous explanation,) removes all the difficulty which 
appears from the use of the future verbs in our authorised ver- 
sion. He reads : — " And this to thee the sign from Jehovah, 
that Jehovah will perform this word which He hath spoken: 
Behold I (am) causing the shadow to go back, the degrees which 
it has gone down {or which have gone down) on the degrees of 
Ahaz, with the sun ten degrees backward ; and the sun re- 
turned ten degrees, on the degrees which it had gone down : " 
and not only is the statement of the Book of Kings, that the 
terms of the sign were deliberately chosen by Hezekiah, wholly 
wanting here, but neither is there anything that requires us to 
suppose that the sign occurred at the very moment in which 
Isaiah first directed the remedy of the figs, and promised the 
king's recovery : the analogy of Isaiah's method of employing 
and appealing to f signs ' on all other occasions, rather favours the 
conclusion that neither he nor Hezekiah would have been in 
such haste ; and that they would have thought the phenomenon 
of the shadow equally a sign and pledge that the promise should 
hold good, though it did not occur till Hezekiah was already in 
the way of recovery. And this is the answer which I deferred 
giving to the question raised by Isaiah's offer to give Ahaz a 
sign ' either in the depth, or in the height above:' — that I 
see no reason to suppose that Isaiah would have been able to 
work a miracle. But I am not equally certain that in his en- 
thusiasm for the cause of the Lord, and his indignation at the 
heartlessness of Ahaz, he may not have expected that the power 
would have been given him ; though the sign that he chose for 
himself was not even an extraordinary natural phenomenon, like 

* Compare Hosea, vi. 2. 

f Vitringa and Gesenius refer to instances of like effects, in modern 
times, of a refraction caused by some vapour or cloud. 

TJ 



290 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



that of the retreating shadow, or the spontaneous crops of wheat. 
Sciolism, religions or sceptical, may sneer at such conclusions ; 
but I believe they will not be deemed either uncritical or pro- 
fane, by him who has familiarised his mind with the habits of 
thought and action of the Hebrew prophets and people, and 
with the meaning of Revelation, as understood by Paul or 
Luther. 

If we prefer to consider, with some commentators, that verses 
21. and 22. are a later addition, we may suppose that Isaiah 
witnessed the going back of the shadow on the steps of Ahaz, 
as he went through 6 the middle court,' and that he saw in it the 
sign that their prayers were heard, and thereupon returned to 
Hezekiah. Whether those verses are a part of the original text 
or not, it may be possible for Hebrew scholars to decide, when 
they can divest their minds of certain prejudices, which are 
hitherto so strongly shown in their conclusions on either side. 
There still remains the prediction, that Hezekiah should live 
fifteen years ; and which, it is said, compels us still to choose 
between a miracle and a narrative after the event. I think not: 
I believe all histories contain coincidences as important and 
striking, which we never suppose to be miraculous : and it may 
also be doubted whether ' fifteen ' is not a round and definite, 
put for an indefinite, number ; and whether the compilers of the 
habitually imperfect, and often inaccurate, Hebrew chronologies, 
may not have calculated the length of Hezekiah 's reign from 
this very statement, assumed to have been literally fulfilled. 
But even if a slight change in, or addition to, the text, be here 
the alternative to a miracle, I see less difficulty in the former 
thau in the latter; though I cannot give all the arguments, 
without writing a complete essay on the miracles of the Old 
Testament, • — w T hich, indeed, is a work much wanted. 

Let me, however, notice one probable objection : namely, that 
in thus unscrupulously applying the ordinary methods of criti- 
cism to the scriptural documents before us, we are forgetful of 
the reverence due to the Bible as God's revelation. It is not 
reasonable to reply to such objections, that truth is truth, and 
that an honest inquirer will disregard the consequences to which 
the pursuit of truth leads him. He is not a rational, if he is 
an honest, inquirer after truth, who fancies it is to be attained 



THE BIBLE TREATED LIKE OTHER BOOKS. 



291 



without that careful verification of his first notions, which can 
only be effected by bringing these to the test of all facts which 
properly bear on the subject ; and the man who by independent 
observations and experiences has ascertained the fact that the 
Bible is the Book of Life and Light, and has a real unity in 
itself, is not only not unphilosophical if he insists on employing 
this fact to verify a critical conclusion, as to such a point as we 
here speak of, but he would be unphilosophical if he were to take 
any other course. But I appeal confidently to the result, if he, 
being a reflecting as well as a religious man, does apply this 
very test. Just as the critical investigation of the works of 
Herodotus, or Livy, has heightened the respect of real scholars 
for authors whom the half-informed alone think objects of 
patronising self-conceit ; so a man's reverence for the Bible is 
helped, and not hindered, when he frankly and clearly recog- 
nises the fact, that its documents are not objects of superstitious 
idolatry, but of manly investigation, and thereby of a respect 
and reverence such as can never be felt for an idol, by whatever 
name we may adjure its worshippers. And, as it is often in- 
structive to see ourselves reflected back in those most opposite 
to us, let us consider that there is a school of thinkers, at the 
head of whom were Hume and Gibbon in the last age, and 
who have not less able and learned representatives in our own, 
who quite accept the dogma that the Bible is not to be treated 
like other books ; and that neither for them, nor for those whom 
their opinions any way influence, is the result reverential for 
the Bible. And, lastly, I ask the reader who has accompanied 
me thus far, in my deliberate and avowed plan of treating this 
book of Isaiah like any other book, what he actually finds to be 
the result ? Does he feel less reverence for it, or for the Book 
of which it is a part ? Does he find that he holds the old 
Christian faith of his fathers, that this Book is indeed the Word 
of God, less heartily than he did before ? 

The questions, of some archaeological interest, whether ihe 
c degrees of Ahaz ' were a sun-dial introduced by that king with 
other Assyrian fashions ; or only a flight of steps on which 
a column or other body cast a shadow ; or whether it was 
the latter, expressly devised for a sun-dial; have been dis- 
cussed with much learning : but as no one conclusion can be 

u 2 



292 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



positively preferred, the reader will find it best to examine them 
at length for himself. It may be worth while to observe, that, 
in any case, there is no reason for assuming that the degrees 
were at least half an hour each, and so marked such large divi- 
sions of time as would require a refraction of the sun's rays far 
beyond any that has been witnessed on any other occasion on 
record. 

c The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, when he was sick, 
and recovered from his sickness,' is a description (as this title 
seems exactly to express) of his feelings and thoughts, during 
the very progress of his illness and cure; verses 10. to 14. de- 
scribing the former, and verses 15. to 20. the latter. Mortal 
disease threatened to cut off his days, when their natural course 
was only at the middle ; he found himself suddenly deprived, 
as by a sentence of punishment, of the rest of his years*; sum- 
moned to leave for ever the bright world of life, — which was so 
pleasant with its human fellowships, and with the presence of 
the Lord in nature, in providence, in the nation, in the temple- 
services, and in his own heart, — and to enter the dark gates of 
the grave, alone, and without the sustaining thought that the 
Lord had passed them before him. j Like a shepherd's tent, 
which never remains long in one place, but has its pins hastily 
pulled up and its covering taken away (the words, says Dathe, 
implying violent and hasty removal), and leaves the lately busy 
encampment a silent desert again; — so, sa} T s Hezekiah, my gene- 
ration, the generation of those inhabitants of the world whom I 
shall behold no more, is departed, or plucked up from me. 
There seems to be no reason for departing from the proper 
meaning of the Hebrew word, which is certainly ( generation/ 

* " Eel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, 
Che la diritta via era smarrita. 
Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura 
Questa selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte, 
Che nel pensier rinnuova la paura ! 
Tanto e amara, che poco e piu morte." 
-j- " Grant, O Lord .... that through the grave and gate of death, we 
may pass to our joyful resurrection ; for His merits who died, and was 
buried, and rose again for us, Thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord." — Collect for 
Easter Even. 



ISAIAH XXXVIII. 9 — 20. : THE HYMN OF IIEZEKIAII. 293 

but rather the contrary ; for the substitution of the image of 
his generation leaving him, for the thought of his leaving them, 
is at least as agreeable to the genius of Hebrew poetry, as it 
evidently would be to that of our own. The tent suggests the 
weaver's web, and the speaker becomes himself the weaver, 
cutting off his life from the loom, or, more exactly, the thrum — 
or threads which join the web to the loom. Perhaps continuing 
the image of the weaver, he says that during the day he ex- 
pected that with the arrival of night God would make an end of 
his life : during the nig-ht the fever ra^ecl in his bones as though 
a lion were gnawing at them, and he reckoned it impossible for 
him to survive beyond the morning ; but then again followed 
the day, with its dull monotonous suffering, so well expressed by 
the repetition of the words in which it was first described, — 
6 from day even to night thou wilt make an end of me.' Some- 
times his pains made him cry out aloud : at other times, his 
strength was so low that he could only c inwardly groan and 
bemoan himself ' (as the elder Lowth explains it) : — e Mine eyes 
fail with looking upward ; O Lord, I am oppressed ; undertake 
for me.' In contrast with the { I said,' of verses 10. and 11. 
stands the c What shall I say ?' with which the psalm passes from 
the description of his sickness to that of his returning health. 
The suddenness of his delivery surprises him, so that he wants 
words to express his thankfulness, and can only say that the 
Lord hath both spoken to him, and Himself done what He 
promised. His soul has passed through great bitterness, and he 
shall remember it, and his deliverance from it, with awe, all the 
days of his life ; — or else, he will go up with reverent joy and 
thankfulness to the temple ever after ; the word being the same 
as in Psalm xlii. 4. In this time of danger in which God alone 
could have saved him, he has learnt to understand that men do 
not live by mere course of nature, but by the word and power 
of God, and to this Divine care he recognises that his own life 
is now due. His great and bitter suffering of spirit as well as 
body is turned into peace ; he realises that his sins, of which he 
had been brought into such fearful consciousness by the approach 
of death, and of which he felt, as men ever have felt, that death 
is the consequence and punishment, are forgiven him ; and that 
his Lord has delivered him with the arms of love from the pit 

u 3 



294 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



of destruction : — c Thou hast loved my soul from the pit of 
destruction,' as the Hebrew beautifully expresses it. Then 
with a renewed expression of that strong feeling of the evil of 
death, and the blessing of life, and with an allusion to his hope 
of children now that his life is spared - — both which we have 
already noticed — he rises more and more into the language of 
joy and triumph. 6 The Lord to save me !' seems to be in the 
form of a battle-shout ; and the 6 songs for stringed instruments,' 
to be sung in perpetual service, in the House of the Lord, 
may be best illustrated by those psalms which are evidently pro- 
cessional and choral, and in some instances, as Psalms cxvi. and 
cxviii., public thanksgivings after sickness, on occasions like 
the present. We might, perhaps, attribute the cxviii th , in par- 
ticular, to Hezekiah himself, and in reference to this sickness. 



ISAIAH XXXIX. : THE EMBASSY FFMl BABYLON. 



295 



CHAPTER XXII. 

isaiah xxxix. : the embassy from babylon. chronicle of eusebius. 

— berosus. — Sennacherib's annals. — books of kings and chro- 
nicles VALUE OF THE LATTER. THE SIN OF HEZEK1AH. TRUSTING 

GOD IN POLITICS. MODERN HISTORY. NIEBUHR AND NAPLES. COL- 

LETTA. REVERENCE FOR GREAT MEN. NATIONS AND RULERS RE ACT 

ON EACH OTHER. HEZEKIAH's RECEPTION OF THE EMBASSY. ISAIAH'S 

DENUNCIATION. ' APRES MOI LE DELUGE.' — PROSPERITY OF ENGLAND. 

RELIGIOUS TEMPER OF OUR STATESMEN. MR. GLADSTONE. 

I have already given the substance of the notices of Mero- 
dach-Baladan and his times, which, having been quoted from 
Berosus by Alexander Polyhistor, came to light a few years 
ago, in the Armenian version of Eusebius's Chronicle ; and also 
that of the Assyrian Annals themselves, in as far as they are 
yet deciphered. The former account stands thus: — "After 
the reign of Sennacherib's brother, Hagisa (or Acises) had pos- 
session of the Babylonian government, but w r as killed by 
Merodach-Baladan before thirty days had elapsed : and he too, 
after a reign of six months, was killed, and succeeded by a man 
named Elibus, in the third year of whose reign Sennacherib, 
king of the Assyrians, marched an army against the Baby- 
lonians, defeated them in a pitched battle, sent Elibus and his 
friends prisoners to Assyria, and made his own son Asordan 
king of Babylon." The other account is, according to Colonel 
Bawlinson, that Sennacherib, in the first year of his reign, 
fought and defeated Merodach-Baladan, whom he seems to have 
found in independent possession of Babylonia, but who now 
fled, leaving his country to be subjugated, and put under an 
Assyrian vice-king 6 a man of the name of Bel-adon (Dr. 
Hincks reads c Bel ib'), the son of one of Sennacherib's con- 
fidential officers, who had been bred up in his palace ' : and in 
the fourth year of Sennacherib's annals — that is, in the year 
after his campaign in Judea — ■ he relates an expedition against 

u 4 



290 



HEBREW POLITICS, 



the Chaldeans, and says, " Merodach-Baladan, whom I had 
defeated in the course of my first year, fled before my chief 
officers, and concealed himself in the country of [name lost], 
which was beyond the sea. His brothers, the offspring of his 
father's house, whom he had left on this side the sea, together 
with the men of the country, I ordered to be removed from 
Beth Yakina [at the mouth of the Euphrates] ; the rest of the 
cities of Merodach-Baladan I destroyed and burned ; at the 
same time I appointed my son Assur Nad in to the government 
of the country, placing him in a position of independence." The 
list of Babylonian kings in Ptolemy's canon does but add a third 
set of discordant notices. The ( son of Sennacherib's confiden- 
tial officer, bred up in his palace,' may have been his foster- 
brother, and the same person whom Berosus calls e his brother : ' 
but I do not pretend to reconcile the accounts. They will not, 
however, appear more different from each other than we should 
expect, if we remember that the deciphering of one is as yet 
more or less tentative, and that we have another at fourth or 
fifth hand, and with strong evidence of extreme carelessness in 
the compiler, Eusebius, himself.* 

Babylonia, therefore, was at this period alternately a pro- 
vince of Assyria, of such importance that royal princes of the 
imperial dynasty were appointed its viceroys ; and independent 
of, and in arms against, that power. And the latter was now 
the case. Merodach-Baladan may have seized the moment of 
Sennacherib's discomfiture in Judea, to raise his standard again ; 
or at least have seen in that discomfiture an opening for an alli- 
ance with the first king whom, as far as we know, Sennacherib 
had not succeeded in finally reducing to submission. We can 
hardly doubt that the embassy, whether sent immediately before 
or after the revolt, was political ; and that the congratulations 
on Hezekiah's recovery, and the inquiry — of particular in- 
terest to the Babylonian astronomers — as to the going back of 

Berosi Fragmenta. Rawlinson's Outline, p. 25. The former is the Ar- 
menian version of Eusebius's account of what Polyhistor relates of the Baby- 
lonian history which Berosus wrote from the original records. 

For a proposed reconciliation of Ptolemy's Canon with Berosus, and of 
both with the Cuneiform Inscriptions, see Dr. Hincks in the Irish Trans- 
actions, xxii. 4. 364 ff. 



BOOKS OF CHRONICLES AND OF KINGS. 



297 



the shadow, were subordinate objects to that of forming an alli- 
ance between Babylon and Judah. This, indeed, may be the 
meaning intended by the mention of the ' letters and present,' 
which were sent to Hezekiah by Merodach-Baladan. If, how- 
ever, there were no such specific advances on his part, the 
spirit of the whole transaction is not the less clear, espe- 
cially on comparison of the parallel account in the Book of 
Chronicles. The author of the Chronicles gives predominance 
to the ecclesiastical, as the author of the Kings does to the 
civil, side of their national history : he is extravagantly censured 
and depreciated by some modern critics, not only for want of 
precision, but for prejudice and partiality — as in omitting such 
unfavourable facts as the idolatries of Solomon ; but even if it 
be not enough to say in reply, that he refers his readers to then 
existing records for ' all the rest ' of the events which he thus 
warns them he does not give, and if we must admit him to have 
had the commonest failing of all historians, we shall lose not 
only many important facts, but also much indispensable light 
upon those of the other historical books, if we reject his help. 
Events which the original chroniclers would have narrated with- 
out explanation, because they were sufficiently intelligible of 
themselves to cotemporaries, he amplifies with explanations of 
their causes : and he thus illustrates things which a different 
state of mental development, as well as of outward circum- 
stances, had made obscure to his own readers, and would, but 
for his aid, be obscure to us who, if we have more pretensions 
to philology and philosophy than he, have no longer all his 
sources of information. Thus he here throws light on the brief 
statements of Isaiah and the Book of Kings, by his account of 
the great prosperity of Judah after the overthrow of Senna- 
cherib, and the way in which the friendship of her king was 
consequently courted by the neighbouring states ; by his point- 
ing out that in the king's manner of receiving those overtures 
he represented the general feeling of his people, so that his act 
was properly national and productive of national consequences ; 
and by his calling our attention to the pregnant truth, that this 
act was but a first manifestation of what was already their 
settled state of mind and heart, and which would therefore as- 
suredly exhibit itself, not merely in this isolated expression, but 



298 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



in the whole subsequent career of the nation, until the state of 
mind itself was changed. And he explains what this state of 
mind was, in the words — 4 Hezekiah rendered not again accord- 
ing to the benefit done unto him ; for his heart was lifted up ; 
therefore there was wrath upon him, and upon Judah and Jeru- 
salem : notwithstanding Hezekiah humbled himself for the pride 
of his heart, both he and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that 
the wrath of the Lord came not upon them in the days of 
Hezekiah.' Here w^as the old, deep-seated, vice re -appearing 
in a form adapted to the new circumstances of the time. The 
Hebrew nation — as indeed every other, now not less than then 
— could only stand by faith in its unseen yet ever-present King, 
and conscientious obedience to His laws : they had quite for- 
gotten this, not for the first time, during the prosperous 
reign of Uzziah, and had ceased to trust in anything but 
their own power and wealth, and the settledness of their insti- 
tutions : when these failed them, during the long years of 
Assyrian supremacy and invasion, they tried with no better 
success their systems of political alliances, intrigues, and coun- 
terpoises, in which Hebrew craft was to outwit barbarian force: 
and now when it might have been hoped that all this severe 
discipline had taught them how vain was their trust in either 
the one or the other, it needed but an opportunity ■ — ( God's 
leaving them to try them, that they might know all that was in 
their heart ' — to prove that both king and people were ready to 
fall back on the old courses, so superficially had the lesson been 
learnt, and so immediately forgotten. Instead of keeping 
steadily in view the fact, that their deliverance from Assyria was 
wrought by God, after all their own schemes had completely 
failed, and adhering to the simple, straightforward, conduct 
which that fact pointed to, they were taking credit to themselves 
for the deliverance, and proposing, or accepting the proposal of, 
a new system of heathen alliances. In these, Judah w T as pro- 
bably to be the patroness, and not the patronised : and the fo- 
reign policy which had been so ruinous in the hands of Ahaz, 
Shebna, and the kings of Samaria, w T as to be made successful 
by a combination with that of the powerful Uzziah, and such as 
he might have adopted, had he not lived before the rise of the 
late Assyrian domination. The fear which characterised the 



TRUSTING GOD IN POLITICS. 



299 



previous policy, was now somewhat modified with pride ; but 
the spirit was the same : for it was the spirit which has no faith 
that, when a man or a nation keeps the plain road of duty and 
honesty, the consequences may be expected without anxiety ; 
and which, therefore, substitutes for such adherence to duty, some 
of those schemes by which mere worldly, godless, politicians are 
still, as in old times, ever striving to compass their ends, whe- 
ther the subversion, or the restoration, of a dynasty or a party, 
or the acquisition, or the preventing of others from acquiring, a 
territory or an office ; but which at last brings them to the in- 
evitable condition which Shakspeare describes as their fate, in 
words so significant as to be worth quoting a second time : — 
e A politician, a man that would circumvent God, o'er-officed by 
an ass.' 

The spirit of such policy is worldly and godless ; but if we 
will study it, and what the Bible reveals concerning it, for our 
own profit, we must look how it works still, as of old, in the 
religious and patriotic, and not in the merely selfish : — in the 
Hezekiahs rather than in the Shebnas. And though the quiet, 
legal, course of modern English politics, does not supply the 
most obvious illustrations of the eternal laws which govern 
it ; yet these are as steadily at work with us as with other 
nations — - only a little closer observation is necessary. A 
greater difficulty lies in the fire which still smoulders under the 
dead-looking ashes, on which he must tread wdio meddles with 
cotemporary history: and, therefore, it is with hesitation that 
I suggest, that we may find a counterpart of Hezekiah's want 
of faith in the future guidance of the God who had led him 
through the past, in the repressive policy which our statesmen 
adopted, and so many of our patriots approved, after the peace 
of 1815. A large part of the best men of that day, seem 
to have lost all clear belief that the God who had just delivered 
Europe from a mightier incarnation of sheer, arbitrary, force 
than Sennacherib's, had any farther work for His Englishmen*, 

* " Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general in- 
stinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their 
thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his 
Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then, but 
reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his English- 



300 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



and that He only required them still to mark and follow the 
method of His counsels. They retained their faith in the ideal 
beauty of freedom and progress, — just as Hezekiah no doubt 
retained his faith : but in a temper essentially analogous, though 
different in form, to that which prompted the alliance of Judah 
with Merodach-Baladan, they renounced, for all practical pur- 
poses, both their youthful love of freedom, and their maturer 
reverence for constitutional rights : and they avowed that, 
while their hopes for the future were utterly dim, their pre- 
sent trust was in the vulgarest expedients of police-craft; 
and in resistance to the reforms which in the abstract they 
admitted to be desirable, but in the demand for which they 
would see nothing but man's sedition, instead of the signs by 
which God was pointing to the forward road. And to come 
down lower, and still nearer home : — Which of us does not 
know, has not felt, how in the eagerness of political parti- 
sanship religious men will practise, and even justify, the un- 
principled support of bad ministers, or adherents of ministers 
in parliament, or at elections ? Who has not heard men, whose 
private morality, and even piety, is above all suspicion, defend 
bribery and corruption at the last elections, and the voting for 
a fool, or a knave, in preference to a wise and honest man, 
because it was in the cause of his party ? Who has not felt 
the temptation to do the like ? 

Though I share the ordinary belief of my countrymen, as to 
the causes of the late European revolutions, and also as to the 
conduct of the several kings and governments since the recovery 
of their power, I think it so impossible to speak of the internal 
politics of a foreign nation without misapprehensions and 
blunders, that I refrain from making the obvious applications 
which would otherwise be here at hand : yet, as I have illus- 
trated a former part of my text at so great length from 
Niebuhr's pictures of his own, and his countrymen's, condition 
and temper during the War of Freedom, I must point to the 
last — only too faithful — resemblance between the two stories. 

men ? — I say, as his manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method 
of his counsels, and are unworthy." — Milton's Speech for the Liberty of Un- 
licensed Printing. 



NIEBUHR AND THE NEAPOLITAN CONSTITUTION. 301 



Already, in 1815, Niebuhr had begun to lament that i the first 
war did them no harm, but that was conducted in a different 
spirit from the present one:' and in 1819, after the description 
already quoted, of what might have been, when c the ground was 
cleared,' &c, he says, — 6 No seed was sown, and so of course 
weeds shot up in rank luxuriance : nothing can exonerate those 
who neglected their duty at that time, from the blame of these 
results : . . . the tone of public feeling has degenerated, 
and God knows how it is to be raised.' And, sadder still, we 
find the religious and philosophic statesman himself, fallen under 
the same unbelief in God's methods. He still loved law and 
liberty as they appeared in past history, or as he conceived of 
their restoration out of mediaeval institutions : but the actual 
process by which alone God will have law, and liberty, and the 
various forms of human progress, developed, was too rough, and 
too soiled with hard and unskilful struggles, to be tolerable to 
him : he not only disliked it, as he did the organisation of 
armies and police for the ends of despotism, but he was glad to 
employ these to put it down. Few things are more painful, 
few more instructive, to him who has studied the laws of po- 
litical society by help of this great man's works, than that story 
of the course Niebuhr took when the Austrian army was at 
Rome, on its way to Naples. He might urge that the Nea- 
politans had not developed a constitution out of their old muni- 
cipalities, which were most, probably too effete for any such 
purpose ; that, with that fatal habit of Italy, whether con- 
queress or conquered, they had gone for their new polity to 
Spain, which, indeed, had given them the one good ruler whom 
they had known for centuries ; and that though their parliament 
did represent the majority, at least, of the possessors of property 
and intelligence throughout the country, it worked but indiffer- 
ently : but a Frenchman in Napoleon's time would have produced 
as plausible arguments for assisting Prussia by external inter- 
ference, as could be adduced for meddling now with Naples. 
Yet Niebuhr, who, some five or six years before, could feel and 
write as we have seen, when the question was between France 
and Prussia, w r as now so eager to tread out the first poor spark 
of Italian liberty, that when the Austrian army was detained 
for want of funds, he (being Prussian minister at Rome), with- 



302 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



out waiting for the directions of his government, pledged its 
credit with the Roman bankers, and so enabled the invading 
army to march on Naples without a moment's delay.* 6 There 
and thus/ as the Neapolitan historian says, c was a great deed of 
that policy of power which modern kings and governments trust 
in, consummated against a people too feeble and too little wise to 
resist.' He acids, 'that this, as every other like event, bears wit- 
ness of the truth, which he will lose no opportunity of proclaim- 
ing, that neither revolutions nor despotisms will in the end 
avail anything ; but that the social culture and elevation of the 
w T hole people is the only effective instrument of worthy and 
durable political reforms, the only real governing power, and 
that to it must the nations direct their hopes and their acts.' 

* There Is apparently an expression of surprise, as well as of disapproval, 
at the natural consequences of the foreign interposition which Niebuhr had 
thus aided, in the following extract from a letter of his to Chevalier Bunsen, 
dated from Naples two years after that event : — "It appears that new pro- 
scriptions are beginning, and that lettres d'exil have come from Vienna. An 
officer has been ordered to leave the country, without even having been 
brought to any trial." — Niebulir's Life and Letters, vol. in. p. lv. 

In Chevalier Bunsen' s defence of the political opinions and character of 
ISTiebuhr, which is prefixed to this volume, and in reference to the point on 
which I have here ventured (not unbecomingly, I trust) to avow my dis- 
sent from the writer, he says — after stating the fact of Niebuhr's anticipation 
of his government's instructions to assist the Austrians — that their army, 
" in spite of the rapidity of its movements, never could get in sight of an 
enemy, not even in the impregnable pass of Androdoco." But high as this 
statesman's authority is in any matter of history, ancient or modern, it is 
perhaps scarcely higher, on a point of cotemporary Neapolitan history, than 
that of Colletta ; and Colletta states, in substance, that the Neapolitan army 
and general, carried away by the undisciplined enthusiasm of raw levies, not 
only attacked the Austrians, instead of remaining on the defensive as pru- 
dence dictated, but attacked without ordinary caution. They advanced from 
the heights of Antrodoco in two columns, and attempted to take Rieti, 
where the Austrians were posted, with the first of these columns, before the 
other could arrive to its support. They were met by no such ill-directed 
measures ; and the Neapolitan army of ' civilians, unacquainted with war,' 
was soon thrown into confusion : a charge of Hungarian cavalry completely 
broke them ; and with a panic as universal as their previous courage, they 
fled and utterly dispersed : so that the Austrians, who advanced cautiously 
on the third day after, found the heights of Antrodoco, and the whole fron- 
tier, open to them, and without further resistance reached Naples, and 
restored the absolute power of Ferdinand I. 'Storia del Reame di Na- 
poli, ix. 10. 32. 



NIEBUHR AND COLL ETTA. 



303 



And when I read these words of the man who was carried 
prisoner to Austria, and died in exile, for the part he had taken 
in the constitutional government of this his own country ; 
when I consider that, whatever the defect, or positive evil, of 
some other elements of that government, it also contained, in 
the germ at least, these doctrines of Colletta, and that the 
wisdom and influence of himself, and of those who thought 
and acted with him, were there, to develope these germs, if 
time and opportunity had been allowed ; when I remember 
that, bad or good, it was the government of the nation's own 
choice ; when I look at these things, and then think that it was 
Niebuhr who urged and aided the Austrian troopers, in crushing 
Naples under their hoofs, and so leaving it at the mercy of a 
power worse than that from which his own country had been 
delivered; I cannot but conclude, in the words of the Bible, 
c Pie rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him.' 

It may be said, that in thus laying bare the faults of men 
who are not only wise and good, but among the teachers from 
whom we must ourselves learn wisdom and goodness, if at all, 
I disturb the reverence of others, while I contradict my own 
professions of it : — but I think not justly. The characters of the 
wise and good who have departed from us, are our own most 
precious heritage; and we are bound by all considerations of 
duty, as well as interest, not only to prize them at the true 
value of all the good that they contain, and offer us, for our use, 
but also to free them from those stains which nothing human 
is, or can be, free from : and this we must do, not by justifying 
or even excusing the fault, but by frank — I might fitly say, 
penitent — avowal of it. This is what each of us, in his 
humbler sphere, would desire to have done for him : it is thus 
that the Bible, as we see in the very case before us, treats its 
heroes and examples : it does not sanction idol-worship, nor 
admit that there is, or can be, any real reverence in super- 
stition. 

The state of nations and their rulers act and re-act upon 
each other. Hezekiah sank under the influence of the gene- 
ral demoralisation, and really shared in it ; and then, by ex- 
pressing it thus publicly in act, he confirmed it in the people, 
If he could have risen entirely above that influence, he would 



304 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



have done much more towards delivering the nation from it 
but we must not forget how very much he actually did, even 
though we suspect from his conduct on the present occasion, 
that he may not have been always so opposed to the policy of 
Shebna, as Isaiah was. 

Hezekiah's reception of the illustrious strangers has been com- 
pared with that of Solon by Croesus, — tov XoXcova OspdrrovTS? 
7rspLrj<yov Kara tov? 07]o-avpov9 koX sirihsUvvaav iravra iovra 
/uLsydXa rs zeal oX/Sca. — 6 He was glad of them,' and showed 
them his arsenals, palaces, treasures, and curious and rare 
things, among which last may have been included 6 the spices 
and the precious ointment : ' or else these may have been spe- 
cimens of the valuable products of ' his dominion ' or realm, as 
we know Jericho and Gilead were famous for their balsam, and 
that Hoshea sent oil, as a present or tribute, to Egypt. It can 
hardly be thought improbable that Isaiah was purposely left in 
ignorance of all these things ; and that the king's uneasy con- 
sciousness of what the prophet's judgment would be, is indicated 
in his reply that the ambassadors came from a far country, as 
though be would make his hospitality seem a duty ; and in the 
reluctance with which he confesses that country to be Babylon. 
Isaiah saw at once into the heart of the matter. It was not 
long before that he had spoken thus to Hezekiah : — 6 Thus 
saith the Lord, the God of David thy father, I have heard thy 
prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto thy days 
fifteen years : and I will deliver thee and this city out of the 
hand of the king of Assyria: and I will defend this city:' — 
and in this reference to the covenant with David and his line, 
and to the city, or nation, of which he was the head in right of 
David, Hezekiah had seen a promise that the line should not fail 
with himself. And now, this is Isaiah's message : — 6 Hear the 
word of the Lord of hosts : Behold, the days come, that all that 
is in thine house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in 
store until this day, shall be carried to Babylon : nothing shall 
be left, saith the Lord : and of thy sons that shall issue from 
thee, which thou shalt beget, shall they take away ; and they 
shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.' Heze- 
kiah's reply expressed neither the highest magnanimity, nor the 
mere selfish egotism which some commentators have seen in it ,* 



APRES MOI LE DELUGE. 



305 



but a mixture of feelings in accordance with all that we know 
of his character. His appreciation of his position and duties as 
a king, is shown in his restoration of the national worship, and 
his final resistance to Sennacherib, as well as in his general and 
successful care for the prosperity of his country. But though a 
religious sense of duty, or the pressure of necessity, could occa- 
sionally stir him to master circumstances by a great effort, we 
may infer from the domination of Shebna, and from his own 
demeanour and language when supplicating Sennacherib's par- 
don ; after the receipt of Rab-shakeh's message, and of Sennache- 
rib's letter ; in the time of his own sickness ; and on the present 
occasion ; that his natural and habitual disposition was rather to 
submit to the guidance of circumstances, with a gentle and pious 
confession that this weakness of his character was beyond cure, 
and to accept the consequences with pious and affectionate re- 
signation to God's will, and thankful acknowledgment of any 
mitigation of them. He could enter into the meaning of the 
Psalmist's words, ( Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though 
Thou tookest vengeance on their inventions:' and though he 
had not, like Moses or Paul, the stern courage which could ask 
that the punishment might be to himself, and the forgiveness to 
his people ; but on the contrary was thankful to learn that there 
should f be peace and truth in his days ;' it must not be over- 
looked that it was peace and truth to his country as well as 
himself, and not merely selfish security, that he was thankful 
for. For this distinguishes his case, and the case of those who in 
times of personal or public calamity feel and act, because they 
are, like Hezekiah, from that expressed in the sentiment — de- 
void alike of religious thankfulness and patriotic sympathy — 
that ( things will last my time.' The sentiment is, indeed, in 
one respect the same in each case ; it expresses the natural, and 
therefore as far as nature is concerned, the inevitable, selfishness 
consequent on the expectation of calamities beyond resistance ; 
and the opportunity which the late European revolutions have 
given us of studying it close at hand, though happily not in our 
own country, enables us, not only to understand its character 
better, but to think more charitably of those who succumb un- 
der it, than we otherwise could have done. But though nature 
is always alike under like circumstances, it may, or it may not 

x 



306 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



be raised above itself by a spirit and a power higher than its 
own. Grace can inspire and transfigure, without destroying, 
nature, and reflect itself even in the infirmities and defects of 
nature : and then, instead of the worldly ' Apres moi le de- 
luge,' we have the pious ' Good is the word of the Lord ; for 
there shall be peace and truth in my days.' The corresponding 
Greek and Latin phrases — i/^ou Savovros, <yala ^u%$^Tft> irvpi, 
and mihi mortuo omnes mortui sunt, — are quoted by Alexander 
from Calvin. Another phase of the temper they express, has 
been already considered, where we had it described by Isaiah as 
that of the worldly men of Jerusalem. 

We too, like Hezekiah and his people, have ' exceeding much 
riches and honour, cities and treasures, and storehouses ; corn, 
and wine, and oil, and possessions of flocks and herds in abund- 
ance ; for God has given us substance very much : ' and we too 
are exposed to the same temptations as they ; and our nation, 
like theirs, may at any time fall under its power, and become 
obnoxious to its consequences and punishment. The warning 
example should never be absent from our thoughts ; for there is 
no one, even the humblest of us, who is not taking a real part 
in the workings of our commonwealth, and influencing its des- 
tiny for good or evil ; and that whether he will or not. There 
is much to fear for England ; yet much to hope also : much to 
be hopeful in, as well as thankful for, in the manifest and in- 
creasing spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and 
mighj, in the fear of the Lord, which God is giving to our 
public men. The religious temper of so large a proportion of 
our statesmen, and their ever-rising moral standard of conduct 
in affairs, show so great a contrast with the low, vulgar, world- 
liness of more than one preceding generation, that it is already 
almost as if the sun were rising upon us through the thick dark- 
ness. And not the least promising among the signs of our happy 
times, is the personal character of him whom the many recog- 
nise now, as the few have long done, as marked out to be our 
First Minister within the next ten years : who, while he pos- 
sesses all the working powers of an English statesman, unites 
a more than ordinary readiness to look out for, and discern, the 
indications of God's plans and purposes, with a more than ordi- 
nary bravery in following these at the sacrifice of that temporary 



MR. GLADSTONE ON AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM. 307 



applause, at the cost of that temporary blame, which the un- 
thinking and the prejudiced multitude for the time attach to 
what they call inconsistency, but which the wise hail as en- 
lightened progress. It may be suspected, that many of the eccle- 
siastical, or even civil, opinions of this statesman, are not held 
by the author of these pages : but my aim has been, not to 
advocate opinions, but to elucidate a method, — the method, 
namely, which recognises the government of a nation to be a 
problem too vast and complicated to be brought within the grasp 
of any one finite intellect; yet a problem which is in itself ra- 
tional, a deliberate design in God's counsels, and of which the 
statesman for the time being may always understand so much as 
the practical needs of the time require, and so much as will pro- 
perly prepare the way for the next, as yet unindicated, step, pro- 
vided that his judgment is enlivened by a God-fearing conscience, 
as well as enlightened by a cultivated intellect, and that he 
walks in the humility of wisdom, and not in the pride of self- 
sufficiency. The men who repealed the corn-laws, could not 
foresee the revolutions of 1848, which we might not have es- 
caped so easily if those laws had been then in existence : the 
men, who, during the previous ten or twelve years, have been 
laying deep and broad foundations for the moral and mental 
elevation of the working classes, could not foresee that the same 
revolutions, and the discovery of the gold regions with all its 
consequences, would open to those classes the road to so increas- 
ing a share of political power, as must end in the overthrow of 
our constitution, if they were to continue in their uneducated 
condition : but in the one case and the other there were sufficient 
indications to him who looked at the moral, as well as to the 
merely calculable, signs, and asked his conscience what was 
right, as well as his understanding what was wise. I will con- 
clude this chapter with a passage from Mr. Gladstone, which, 
though little known, is worthy of Milton, or of Burke, for elo- 
quence and constitutional philosophy, and not unconnected with 
the subjects we have been considering. 

" Miserable indeed would be the prospect of the coming 
times, if we believed that authority and freedom were simply 
conflicting and contradictory elements in the constitution of a 
community, so that whatever is given to the one must be de- 

x 2 



308 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ducted from the other. But no Briton, who has devoted any 
portion of his thoughts to the history of his country, or the 
character of its inhabitants, can for a moment be ensnared into 
that, for him, false and degrading belief. It has been provi- 
dentially allotted to this favoured isle that it should show to all 
the world, how freedom and authority, in their due and wise 
developements, not only may co-exist in the same body, but 
may, enstead of impairing, sustain and strengthen one another. 
Among Britons, it is the extent and security of freedom which 
renders it safe to entrust large powers to Government, and it is 
the very largeness of those powers and the vigour of their 
exercise, which constitute, to each individual of the community, 
the great practical safeguard of his liberties in return. The 
free expression of opinion, as our experience has taught us, is 
the safety-valve of passion. That noise, when the steam escapes, 
alarms the timid ; but it is the sign that we are safe. The 
concession of reasonable privilege anticipates the growth of 
furious appetite. Regularity, combination, and order, especially 
when joined with publicity, have of themselves a marvellous 
virtue; they tend to subordinate the individual to the mass, 
they enlarge by healthy exercise the better and nobler parts of 
our nature, and depress the poorer and meaner ; they make man 
more a creature of habits, and less of mere impulse; they 
weaken the relative influence of the present, by strengthening 
his hold upon the future and the past, and their hold upon him. 
By gathering, too, into organised forms the various influences 
that bear sway in a mixed community, and leaving them to 
work within prescribed channels, those which are good acquire 
the multiplied strength of union, while the bad neutralise one 
another by reciprocal elimination. It is a great and noble 
secret, that of constitutional freedom, which has given to us the 
largest liberties, with the steadiest throne, and the most vigorous 
executive, in Christendom. I confess to my strong faith in the 
virtue of this principle. I have lived now for many years in 
the midst of the hottest and noisiest of its workshops, and have 
seen that amidst the clatter and the din a ceaseless labour is 
going on ; stubborn matter is reduced to obedience, and the 
brute powers of society, like the fire, air, water, and mineral of 
nature, are with clamour indeed, but also with might, educated 



SECRET OF CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY. 309 



and shaped into the most refined and regular forms of usefulness 
for man. I am deeply convinced, that among us all systems, 
whether religious or political, which rest on a principle of 
absolutism, must of necessity be, not indeed tyrannical, but 
feeble and ineffective systems ; and that methodically to enlist 
the members of a community, with due regard to their several 
capacities, in the performance of its public duties, is the way to 
make that community powerful and healthful, to give a firm 
seat to its rulers, and to engender a warm and intelligent devo- 
tion in those beneath their sway." * 

* Letter to the Right Rev. W. Skinner, D.D., on the Functions of Laymen 
in the Church, pp. 15, 16. 

The reader may compare Mr. Roebuck's description of the operation of 
the "immense safety-valve of parliamentary debate" in November, 1830; 
and his contrast between the French and English methods of enforcing opi- 
nions ; in his History of the Whig Ministry, vol. i. p. 345. 356. 



310 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

ISAIAH XL LXVI. : QUESTION OF THE GENUINENESS OF THE LAST CHAPTERS 

OF ISAIAH. PSEUDO-ISAIAN HYPOTHESIS. THE NAME OF CYRUS. 

CORESH, AND THE LORD'S SERVANT. MODERN EXPLANATIONS. MOLLEr's 

INTERPRETATION. DOUBTS AND CERTAINTIES. THE POSITIVE METHOD. 

COHERENCE OF EARLIER AND LATER PROPHECIES. THE EARLIER NOT FUL- 
FILLED AS ISAIAH HAD EXPECTED. — ENLARGEMENT OF HIS VIEWS. FINITE 

AND INFINITE IDEALS. FACTS FOR INDUCTION AS TO THE NATURE OF 

PROPHECY. NOTE ON STRAUSS, AND THE APPLICATION OF POSITIVE CRI- 
TICISM TO CHRISTIANITY. 

AVe are now arrived at the question, whether the last twenty - 
six chapters of the Book which bears the name of Isaiah, on a 
title-page which has come down to us as a part of the text itself, 
were really written by him, or by an otherwise unknown pro- 
phet, living towards the end of the Captivity. And let us, at 
the outset, make it quite clear to our minds, that the point at 
issue is, whether the actual text is hopelessly corrupt, spurious 
beyond doubt ; and not whether a very ingenious, elaborate, and 
plausible substitute for that text, may not be conveniently 
adopted by us, even though no such spuriousness has been made 
out. 

The argument then — I state it as strongly as I can — for 
believing the text to be spurious, is this : That while the writer 
prophesies the restoration of the Jews as a future event, he 
seems, as of course, and in the manner not of a prophet, but of 
a cotemporary, to recognise the captivity, and the events which 
we know from history to have then occurred, as the state of 
things in which he was actually living. Micah, in the days of 
Hezekiah, foretold that £ Zion should be ploughed like a field, and 
Jerusalem become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the 
high places of the forest ; that the daughter of Zion should go to 
Babylon, and that there the Lord should redeem her from the 
hand of her enemies:'* — but let us fairly compare the tone of 



* Micah, iii. 12. iv. 10. 



THE LAST CHAPTERS OF ISAIAH. 



311 



these words with the following : 4 That saith to Jerusalem, thou 
shalt be inhabited, and to the cities of Judah, ye shall be built, 
and I will raise up the decayed places thereof ; that saith to the 
deep be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers ; that saith of Cyrus, 
he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure, even say- 
ing to Jerusalem, thou shalt be built, and to the temple, thy 
foundation shall be laid:'* — and by the side of both these 
passages let us put the opening words of Ezra's narrative : 
( Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word 
of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the 
Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, that he 
made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also 
in writing, saying, Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord 
God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, 
and he hath charged me to build Him an house at Jerusalem, 
which is in Judah : who is there among you of all his people ? 
his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is 
in J udah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel (He 
is the God), which is in Jerusalem : ' — And then do we not see 
how different the tone of the first passage is from that of the 
second, and how like that of the second to the third ? The name 
of Cyrus is repeated in the xlvth chapter of Isaiah : and in the 
lxivth we have the words, ( Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion 
is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation, our holy and beautiful 
house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire, 
and all our pleasant things are laid waste ;' while the rest of the 
chapter is an appeal to the Lord to put an end to this miserable 
condition of His people, and is thus one of several instances in 
which that condition — the actual and now long existing captivity 
— is assumed in a way which unprejudiced criticism, it is urged, 
must admit to be historical, not prophetic. 

The subsidiary arguments, drawn from the style of writing, 
and especially from the presence of certain words or idioms, 
have been considered in Chapter IX. : only I may remark, that 
Gesenius now unintentionally supports the view there taken. 
For though he gives a list of fifteen supposed modern words and 
usages, he throws great doubt on the possibility of distinguishing 

* Isaiah, xliv. 26. 
x 4 



312 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



between fancy and fact in the matter, when he says that the 
Hebrew literature of the date of the exile is so free from any 
strong Chaldaic colouring, as to account for the reluctant ad- 
mission of Eichorn and Bertholdt that they could find none in 
these latter chapters ; and when he allows that the resemblances 
of style between these and the unquestioned works of Isaiah are 
such as he can best explain by supposing that the two were 
harmonised by an editor, he inevitably suggests that they might 
have been modernised in the same way. I believe the matter- 
of-fact investigator will come to the conclusion, that the first 
argument is that in which the real strength of the case lies; 
and that its main source and support is the word 6 Cyrus,' just 
as the word e Babylon ' was on another occasion. Whatever 
is the difficulty from the historical tone of those passages I 
have quoted or referred to, its vitality is in this name ; for as 
long as we have no really satisfactory explanation of its pre- 
sence in a prophecy by Isaiah, we must allow it to give its own 
historical character to the context ; but if such an explanation 
were found, that context, and all its difficulties, would at once 
become so many facts from which to draw a more complete 
induction as to the nature of Hebrew prophecy. 

But whatever may be the adequate explanation which we 
need, I am unable to admit that it is afforded by the hypothesis 
of the late date of these chapters. An examination of par- 
ticulars shows that, whatever we must grant of detached pas- 
sages, the general matter of the discourse is not that of a Jew 
living in Babylon in the time of the Captivity, but of a prophet 
in Jerusalem, depicting the scene in vision; and depicting it in 
the very manner of Isaiah, whose habits of thought, as well as 
language, we recognise perpetually, and to whose times and posi- 
tion some passages are most suitable, and some directly allude. 
Such are the comparison of Zion to a bride whose name shall be 
Hephzibah, which was the name of Hezekiah's wife, and the 
mother of his heir* ; the words of comfort to the eunuchs f, com- 
pared with the prediction of the lot of the royal family J ; the argu- 
ment from the ritual sacrifices, which has no meaning if addressed 
to those to whom it was no longer possible to perform the temple- 

* IxiL 4, f lvi. 3. I xxxix. 7. 



THE PSEUDOISAIAN HYPOTHESIS. 



313 



service because there was no temple * ; and the description f of 
Zion, whose watchmen are dumb and drunken, and her righte- 
ous men taken away by death, while she, the sorceress and har- 
lot, sends her messengers and presents to the king afar off, and 
debases herself to hell : — words which make us think, on the one 
hand, of Isaiah's former denunciations of the national idolatries, 
the worldly princes and prophets, their persecutions, their ( cove- 
nants with death and hell,' the embassy to Egypt, and the 
alliance with Merodach-Baladan ; and on the other, of the his- 
torian's description of the reign of Manasseh, when these na- 
tional crimes were reproduced in their wonted forms, and 
would have been already foreseen by the prophet. The argu- 
ment of the whole passage, of which that very description 
of Coresh % 9 as .the rebuilder of the destroyed temple, is a 
part, loses all effective sense unless it be taken as the utter- 
ance of a prophet in some previous age, and not of a co- 
temporary of Cyrus. For it maintains that the Lokd's God- 
head is proved by his ability to govern the world according 
to a previous plan, and that the fact of this previous plan 
is shown by its announcement beforehand, e declaring the 
end from the beginning and from ancient times the things 
that are not yet done:' and if this declaration was not really 
made from ancient times, but only when the events were 
so near that ordinary intelligence would expect them, the pass- 
age before us either has a meaning too vapid for us readily to 
accept it as the only conclusion from premises of so much in- 
tellectual power, or else the writer intended to pass it off on his 
cotemporaries as an ancient prophecy, by a pious fraud not less 

* xliii. 22- 18., in the last verse of which the verbs are future in the 
original. 

j lvi. 9. — lvii. 11. Ewald admits that this passage must have been 
•written while the kingdom of David still existed, and is exactly suited to 
the times of Manasseh ; from which, he says, there is no doubt (' es leidet 
bei naherer Ansicht keinen Zweifel') that the ' unnamed' prophet, writing 
in the days of the exile, has quoted from an older prophet, because he could 
hardly have said any thing better of his own : — an instructive specimen of 
the way in which the speculative criticism makes facts to supply the place 
of the historical ones it has thrown aside. 

% The same Hebrew word as stands for Cyrus in Ezra, Chronicles, and 
Daniel. 



314 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



irreconcilable with his high moral tone. Moreover, the resem- 
blance, which is thought to be so striking between the descrip- 
tion of Coresh in the words before us, and the historical accounts 
of the Persian king, is not the whole case. For plausible as 
it seems to understand one ' called, and named, by ^the God of 
Israel, though he has not known Him,' to be a heathen, though 
providential, instrument of Israel's deliverance : yet these expres- 
sions, and still more their context, are so like, or even identical 
with, those of a number of other passages which it requires 
the utmost forcing to apply to Cyrus, that if the former are 
decided to indicate a contemporary Persian king — or indeed 
any other than a national Personage — the latter become an in- 
extricable puzzle : and the commentators are never able to agree 
whether they refer to Cyrus, to Israel, or to the Messiah. 
This will be shown more clearly by some instances : — 



Coresh. 
That saith to Coresh, he is my 
shepherd, and shall perform all 
my pleasure: even saying to Je- 
rusalem, thou shalt be built, and to 
the temple, thou shalt be founded : 



Thus saith the Lord to his 
Anointed, to Coresh, whose right 
hand I have holden : 



To tread down nations before 
him, and I will loose the loins of 
kings : 



Israel : the Lord's Servant. 

He shall feed his flock like a 
shepherd, xl. 11. Thou shouldest 
be my servant to raise up the 
tribes of Jacob. ... I will give 
thee for a covenant to the people, 
to establish the earth, to cause to 
inherit the desolate heritages . . . 
their pastures shall be in all high 
places, xlix, 6 — 9. I have cre- 
ated him for my glory. Thou 
art my servant, O Israel, in 
whom I will be glorified, xlix. 3. 

Behold my servant whom I 
uphold, I have put my spirit upon 
him. xlii. 1. The spirit of the 
Lord God is upon me because 
the Lord hath anointed me. 
lx. 1. I will uphold thee with 
the right hand of my righteous- 
ness, xli. 10. I the Lord have 
called thee .... and will hold 
thine hand. xlii. 6. 

I have made of thee a sharp 
threshing instrument, xli. 15. 
Kings shall see and arise, princes 
also shall worship, xlix. 7. 



THE NAME OF CYRUS. 



315 



I will go before thee, and make 
the crooked places straight : I 
will give thee the treasures of 
darkness, and hidden riches of 



secret places : 

That thou inayest know that I, 
the Lord which call thee by thy 
name, am the God of Israel : 

For Jacob my servant's sake, 
and Israel mine elect, I have even 
called thee by thy name ; I have 
surnamed thee, though thou hast 
not known me : 



I will lead them in paths that 
they have not known : I J will 
make darkness light before them, 
and crooked things straight, 
xlii. 16. Ye shall eat the riches 
of the Gentiles, lxi. 6. 

I have called thee by thy 
name .... I am the Lord thy 
God, the Holy One of Israel, 
xliii. 1. 3. 

Thou Israel art my servant 
.... thou whom I have taken 
from the ends of the earth, and 
called thee from the chief men 
thereof, xli. 9. Who is blind, 
but my servant, or deaf, as my 
messenger that I sent ? xlii. 19. 
I said, behold, behold me, to a 
nation that was not called by my 
name. lxv. 1. I will bring the 
blind by a way that they knew 
not. xlii. 16. 

That they might be called, Trees 
of righteousness, the planting of 
the Lord .... they shall build 
the old wastes .... the former 
desolations .... the waste cities 
.... I will direct their work in 
truth, and I will make an ever- 
lasting covenant with them .... 
Behold his reward is with him, 
and his recompense before him. 
lxi. 3, 4. 8., lxii. 11. 

If the reader considers not only these instances, but the whole 
tone and spirit of their context ; and not least, the use of the 
phrase ' His Anointed/ which, with one very doubtful exception, 
is appropriated to the kings, prophets, priests, and patriarchs of 
the chosen nation of Israel ; I think he will agree with me, that 
all this interchange and fusion of thoughts and images are utterly 
inexplicable in the mouth of a Jewish prophet of any age. 
No one could have attributed to a heathen king the character 
of the Messiah, and even of the Lord of Israel Himself. 

Again, we need an explanation of the anomaly that a ge- 



I have raised him up in righte- 
ousness, and I will direct all his 
ways : he shall build my city, 
and he shall let go my captives, 
not for price nor for reward. 



316 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



nius not inferior to that of Isaiah should appear in a period 
when Hebrew literature had nearly arrived at its extinction, 
through a gradual decay, the stages of which are as easily 
traceable as those of any other nation ; and that having appeared, 
his name and personality should have been lost, when those of 
Ezra, Haggai, and Zechariah were preserved. And, lastly, it 
must be objected to the hypothesis of the non-genuineness of 
these chapters, that they leave Isaiah's character an inexplicable 
puzzle. Such a man as his unquestioned works show him to 
have been, would not have been content with the desponding 
though pious resignation of Hezekiah: nature would indeed 
have ' told her first lie in her noblest creature,' if Isaiah could 
thus terminate his fifty years' ministry. But though we might 
expect that a system of criticism which professes to follow the 
guidance of the known laws of nature and the human mind, 
instead of the arbitrary dogmas of theology, would at least 
have suggested that death might have prematurely closed the 
prophet's career, at the moment when he had been compelled 
to destroy with his own hands the work of his life; its ad- 
vocates on the contrary tell us that he has left us one piece 
of a later date than his denunciation of Hezekiah's sin, — 
namely, the prophecy against Egypt, in which he repeats his 
old promises, just as if they had never been proved nugatory. 
They do indeed say that he was a very old man when he 
wrote it. 

Now, though objections of this sort (with the exception of 
one to which we must return), are worth nothing against the 
genuineness of a text which has the fact of historical existence 
in its favour, they are not unimportant when they stand in the 
way of our accepting a conjectural emendation of that text. 
For the first essential of such an emendation is, that it shall be 
itself free from all internal difficulty, and so far thoroughly 
suitable for taking the place of what is not capable of explan- 
ation, as it stands. And therefore, after applying these and 
the like tests to the extent of my ability, I am compelled 
(though not without a painful sense of presumption, and a wish 
that some more competent man had been put on the service) to 
conclude, and pronounce, that this theory of the non-genuine- 
ness of these chapters, and of their date being that of the cap- 



MODERN EXPLANATIONS. 



317 



tivity, is untenable : that, in the language of Bacon*, the e ori- 
ginal notions ' (as to the nature of prophecy) on which it rests, 
are c vitiated, confused, hastily abstracted from things, vague, 
not clearly defined and limited ; and the secondary notions ' (as 
to the style, late date, &c.) 4 formed no less rashly ;' so that 
the result itself ' is not well put together, nor justly formed, 
but resembles a magnificent structure that has no foundation. 5 
Magnificent I will not deny it to be : in this respect it probably 
ranks next after the great master-piece of our age, in this kind — 
f The Life of Jesus,' by Strauss f : and the one, like the other, 
is so elaborate for its learning and rhetoric, and so coherent for 
its logic, that it requires a rather stringent application of the 
Baconian torture, or Socratic cross-examination, before a man 
can drive home the question, What meaning, what realities, lie 
under these grand concatenations of words ? and so elicit the 
answer — None. But if we do contrive to ( renounce our no- 
tions, and begin to form an acquaintance with things,' we shall, 
I believe, find that we are here dealing with one of those idols 
— idols at once for their illusive non-reality, and for the super- 
stitious devotion they receive — which, Bacon warns us, ' beset 
the human mind,' and can only be e expelled ' by ( true induc- 
tion.' And while we might trace, in the scheme before us, 
some features of each of his four kinds of idols, it may perhaps 
be especially designated as an 6 idol of the theatre,' a e play 
brought out and performed, creating a fictitious and theatrical 
world.' 

But this disposes, not of our difficulty, but of one unsatis- 
factory solution of it. Let us then examine the arguments of 
those who maintain the genuineness of the text. The old, or- 
thodox, explanation which we find, as the received one, in 
Josephus, is that the mention of Cyrus is a miraculous predic- 
tion : but though this is still asserted to be the true solution by 
many of the most recent commentators ; and though they urge, 
with some force, that if a miracle were ever possible, this was 
no unworthy occasion for one, and that the prophet's own words 
declare as much ; yet they show that they feel the difficulty 
which their opponents avow ; and they do, in fact, abandon the 

* Instauratio Magna, pp. I. 12. 386. ff. Apb. xiv. xvi. xxiii. xxxix. (Bohn.) 
f See note at the end of the Chapter. 



318 HEBREW POLITICS. 

old position, when they suppose themselves to be only for- 
tifying it with another, collateral, explanation. This is, that 
the name of Cyrus, which most modern philologists, like the 
Greek historians, derive from the Persian word for f Sun,' was a 
Persian title, analogous to those of the Egyptian Pharoah and 
Ptolemy, the Philistian Abimelech, the Amalekitish Agag, 
and the Roman Caesar ; and that it was known as such to Isaiah, 
either from Persian travellers or the Medes in Sennacherib's 
army, so that he would have meant no more than Jeremiah 
expresses by c The Lord hath raised up the spirit of the kings 
of the Medes : ' — that this explanation is confirmed by the state- 
ment of Herodotus and Strabo, that Cyrus had another name 
before he ascended the throne ; and by the fact that a much 
later Persian king, Bahram, w r as surnamed Kur : — and that 
it is possible that the royal author of the proclamation given by 
Ezra may have adopted the title the more readily from the men- 
tion of it in these prophecies of Isaiah, which, according to 
Josephus, were shown him by the Jews.* This conjecture that 
Cyrus was a royal title, and not an individual name, is, more- 
over, supported by the evidence (quoted from Burnouf by Ha- 
vernickf) that some such title as Coresh, taken to mean the sun, 
was very widely extended among the Arian races, and adopted 
both by Persian and Indian dynasties : and Colonel Rawlin- 
son's opinion may be adduced on the same side; for while 
he doubts the connection between Coresh, or Kurush, and Khur 
(the Persian for ' sun '), he e compares the former with the Sans- 
krit Kuriih or Kurus, which was probably a popular title 
among the Arian race before the separation of the Median and 
Persian branches,' and adds, that 6 the Kuru race of ancient 
India, descended from the famous Kuruh, the son of Samavarana, 
is too well known to require notice.' \ And then this explana- 
tion is combined with the old view, by the argument, that 
although we have no right to suppose that Isaiah did or could 
blindly predict a mere unmeaning proper name of an individual 
two hundred years before his appearance, yet it is in accordance 

* Hengstenberg's Christology, translated by Keith. I believe Hensler 
was the originator of this explanation. 

f Havernick, Einleitung in d.A. T. II. ii. 164. fF. 
X Journal of the Asiatic Society, vol. xi. p. 112. 



moller's interpretation. 



319 



with the Christian idea of prophetic inspiration to believe that 
he could — miraculously indeed, but intelligibly to those who 
admit any miracles — utter such a prediction of a name thus 
significant of the nation and the office of him who was to bear 
it. This view has been worked out in an interesting manner 
by Havernick ; but it seems to me to be open to the main 
objections against that which we have already considered, — 
namely, that it offers us an hypothesis where we need a fact, 
historical or critical ; that it starts from an unverified theory of 
prophecy, instead of ascertaining the nature of prophecy by a 
complete induction from facts ; and that it forcibly, though in- 
geniously, adapts the facts to the theory. The difference be- 
tween the two schools is here, as before, that the one is ready 
to sacrifice facts in order to get rid of figments, and the other 
to justify the figments for the sake of the facts, of which they 
are assumed, on both sides, to be an inseparable part. Yet 
here, as always, — we might be sure, though we could not see 
it, — earnestness and honesty are continually getting the better 
of passion and prejudice on both sides, and a middle path of 
truth is gradually clearing out. 

Of this, I think, we find something in the explanation pro- 
posed by Moller, the Danish critic*, — that is, as to the word 
Coresh ; for his Grrotius-like supposition that these latter chap- 
ters were written by Isaiah during the captivity of Manasseh, 
and in historical reference to that event, seems less tenable* 
After urging the improbability that Isaiah should have ex- 
ercised a power of prediction which Jesus Himself never showed, 
and that the name of a Persian king, though not that of the 
Saviour of the world, should have been thus predicted; and 
after showing the want of probability and coherence in the 
sense which it is now necessary to give to various passages in 
which Cyrus is supposed to be named or referred to ; he con- 
cludes that the word is no proper name at all, and that it is as 
much by accident that Isaiah here uses a word consisting of the 
same letters with which the Jews afterwards wrote the name 
of Cyrus, as it is that he calls the mother of Immanuel nb^y 
6 Alma,' in chap. vii. 14., where no one finds a prediction of the 
i alma mater ' of the Church of Rome. He then proceeds to 

* De Auihentia Oraculorum Esaice. Havnice, 1825. 



320 HEBREW POLITICS. 

inquire what is the meaning of the word, in the same way as 
scholars have to determine the meaning of so many other 
words, not only in Hebrew but in other languages, by reference 
to kindred roots, analogous forms, and by the sense of the 
context. This sense, he says, requires the word to indicate the 
people of Israel: and he explains it — Bhia — to be, by meta- 
thesis for "1^13, the participle Benoni of the root 1^3, to be 
right, and so to mean, like the same participle of the cognate 
I^J, upright or righteous. He thus brings the word into con- 
nection with (Jeshurun, as the diminutive of endearment 
for Jashur, the Upright) in verse 2. of the same xlivth chapter 
in which we have Coresh ; and with the same word ""i^J (' make 
straight,' or c direct,' in our Version), in verses 2. and 13. of the 
next chapter, as well as in xl. 3, 4. The metathesis he justifies 
by the constant usage of the Hebrew, and suggests that it may 
have been here adopted in order to avoid the inconvenience 
of one word ending, and the next beginning, with "i. 

I have hitherto met with none but the slightest and most 
contemptuous notice of this explanation of Moller's ; but as far 
as it is possible to judge on a point which has not been argued 
out by scholars on both sides, I venture to think that it solves 
all the requirements of the case. If there be philological 
objections which I do not perceive, I should fall back on what 
the most cautious and positive critics admit to be an allowable 
mode of solving a difficulty, where all others are hopeless : — 
the change of the single word, as a simple corruption of the 
MSS., for some other which will properly supply its place. In 
any case I think the prophet is speaking of the ' Servant of the 
Lord,' and not of a Persian king. Let the reader try the 
effect of taking ' Coresh ' in this sense, and I think he will find 
— not that nothing can be said against it, but — that it offers 
him the only really coherent text, and interpretation, that have 
been yet proposed ; and that it presents nothing that we should 
have thought a difficulty, if we had not been so long accus- 
tomed to the rabbinical explanation. 

c If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts ; 
but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in 
certainties,' says Bacon. And the one guide through these doubts 



RETURN TO THE POSITIVE METHOD. 



321 



to certainties, is an honest, truthful temper : and this will be the 
easier to preserve, if we are on our guard against the ambition 
of acquiring complete knowledge while partial alone is possible 
for us. And I would remind the reader that in the case before 
us, it is better — will give more of the satisfaction which comes 
of real knowledge and nothing else — if he suspends his judg- 
ment till he can really see to the bottom of the difficulty with 
his own eyes, and does not attempt to persuade himself by par- 
tial statements and arguments, that he has found a complete solu- 
tion, which his cooler judgment will disavow. 

Yet the positive, matter-of-fact, method has served us hitherto : 
taking this book as we found it, and for what it professed to be, 
and the arrangement of its contents as an integral part of the 
text, no less needful to be studied than the grammar and logic 
of the sentences, yet fearlessly and honestly ascertaining at every 
step whether we were on firm ground, we have hitherto found 
the road plain enough : and while the critics do point out some 
apparent indications that our path now ends in what the haze 
of their speculations cannot make me call other than a sheer 
precipice, there is still a good hope that this seeming precipice 
is only the arrival of the road at the brow of a hill, from which, 
when we get to it, the view will be clearer and more extensive, 
and the forward road more plain than ever. Let us then re- 
turn to the book as it is, and hear its own story, as far as we 
can make it out. 

We have found, on examination, that there is no valid rea- 
son for doubting, that there is satisfactory reason for deciding, 
that all the prophecies hitherto under our consideration, are the 
genuine writings of Isaiah ; and that each of them - ~ that on 
Egypt among the rest — stands in its proper place : and from 
their contents we have gradually obtained a distinct acquaintance 
with the prophet's times, with his personal character, and with 
the nature and course of his political career. Uzziah's able ad- 
ministration, both foreign and domestic, with enough of military 
discipline, and actual warfare, to give manly energy to the peo- 
ple, yet with a still greater care for agriculture, trade, and com- 
merce by land and sea, had raised Judah to a high point of 
material prosperity ; and the impulse thus imparted to it, con- 
tinued during the reign of his successor Jotham, whose nobles 

Y 



322 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



and statesmen, like himself, not only inherited their fathers' 
political maxims and habits along with their wealth and honours, 
but had also been trained in their practical school. But their 
prosperity had long become merely material. For their morality 
was no more than an employment of the forms and the ministers 
of the law to effect iniquitous and criminal objects ; and their 
religion a performance of the mosaic ritual, by men who did not 
conceal the sceptical opinions, or the superstitious idolatries, 
which had taken the place of a living faith in their minds, 
accordingly as these happened to be intellectual or formal. Con- 
sequently, when the third generation — that of Ahaz — suc- 
ceeded, it was too completely enervated by luxury and vice to 
maintain the traditional policy even against such feeble enemies 
as Ephraim, Syria, or Philistia, and still less to make head against 
the truly formidable power which had begun again to threaten 
the world from Assyria. A crisis, or judgment day, had ar- 
rived, in which the general corruption and depravity must be 
punished, or else truth and righteousness would be permanently 
superseded by iniquity, and selfishness, and a mere kingdom of 
the devil. And the sentence then, as always, was executed 
through the providential coincidence of this attack from the 
scourge of God, with the moment when long-continued vice had 
produced that internal weakness and imbecility which are its 
proper fruits ; according to the law which has united sin and its 
punishment in inevitable sequence, and provided that the loss of 
ordinary intelligence and ability to avoid the latter shall be one 
of the links of the chain. The accumulated wealth of the coun- 
try was exhausted in buying, or rather trying to buy, the pro- 
tection, or the forbearance, of the Assyrian hordes, who not only 
wasted the land year after year, when it was cultivated, but pre- 
vented its cultivation by carrying the inhabitants into slavery, 
and especially to Babylon, the people of which seem, according to 
Micah, Isaiah's cotemporary, as well as to himself, to have taken 
a chief part in the oppression of Israel. But reformation was 
the end, and punishment only the means, — the anger of a 
Father not only ready, but longing, to forgive his children, and 
to receive them again to his heart: and while the old vicious gene- 
ration was thus gradually rooted out, a new one, of which Isaiah, 
Hezekiah, and Eliakim, were the leaders, grew up under the 



COHERENCE OF EARLIER AND LATER PROPHECIES. 323 



salutary though trying discipline of national humiliation and 
suffering. And when this discipline had done all that it could 
do for that time ; when God had by it taught his people all that 
they were capable of learning from it, without being wholly 
consumed in the process ; and when He had at least secured a 
permanent result for the world, if not for a people too perverse 
to partake therein ; He delivered Judah from its great oppres- 
sors, and restored it to peace and prosperity under its king. 

Men are the agents, God Himself being present to direct 
them, in the accomplishment of the laws of His moral govern- 
ment of the world : and it was a main part of Isaiah's mission 
to ( make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, 
and to shut their eyes, lest they should see and understand, and 
convert and be healed.' His deprecatory question c Lord, how 
long,' is illustrated by his habitual practice of immediately 
following up his warnings and denunciations with consolatory 
promises : and if it ever seemed to him, as it seems to many 
of us now, that the melancholy task was imposed by an un- 
pitying sternness, he would have learnt, and we may learn, that 
it was not so, when it was adequately explained by the events of 
after years. These showed that, whatever worth the national re- 
formation under Hezekiah possessed, it did owe to the long con- 
tinuance of the previous punishment ; and that, even as it was, 
this had not been enough to make any permanent impression, 
but that in simple fact the people had been allowed to ( convert 
and be healed ' too soon, and that the whole process had to be 
gone through again, with redoubled severity. And while the 
short narrative we have lately been considering in the thirty- 
ninth chapter, tells us how unflinchingly Isaiah threw down, with 
his own hands, the structure of national prospects which he had 
been building up during a ministry of near fifty years, the sub- 
sequent chapters, to the end of the book, show him deliberately 
raising it again, in a manner exactly consistent with his whole 
previous character and teaching. And consistent alike in its 
resemblances and its differences: for while the man and the 
prophet with whom we have become so familiar in the past 
prophecies, meets us throughout the new, in his old individual 
shape, we recognise and identify him, not more by his faith and 
hopes, his philosophy and imagination, and his whole method of 



324 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



looking at men and things, and God's government of both, 
than by his wonted exercise of that prerogative of a man of 
genius, and a prophet of God, by which he adapts himself, and 
his teaching, to the new necessities which this new experience 
had revealed. And though I do not forget that there is no 
more perfect unity than that which results from the work of 
successive labourers actuated by the same idea, of which the 
Book of Psalms, the Bible itself, and, in another kind, the build- 
ing of York cathedral, are instances ; and though it would be 
possible to make out a very good case in favour of such being 
the unity of the book before us, if we only had a foundation 
of fact to begin with; still I appeal with confidence to the 
judgment of every thorough and matter-of-fact student of our 
text, whether there is not complete consistency and coherency 
in the mind and writings of the one man Isaiah ; and whether 
the theory which divides him into an Isaiah and a 4 Pseudo- 
Isaiah,' or e Great Unnamed,' does not deprive the former, if 
not also the latter, half, of much more than half its meaning. 
To myself it often seems that, if these latter prophecies of 
Isaiah had been lost, some Cuvier or Owen of human science 
might be conceived restoring them in their actual shape, from 
the indications of their law and germ in his earlier writings. 
And, on the other hand, I am irresistibly reminded of the 
Jewish tradition, that Isaiah was sawn asunder by those who 
misunderstood, and denied, his real orifice and powers : — and 
think how that tradition has been, by a reversal of the ordinary 
process, provided with its philosophical idea, and transformed 
into a regular myth, after 2000 years of mere historical existence. 

The £ years that bring the philosophic mind ' * had come to 
Isaiah, with the last qualification needed to enable him to com- 
plete one of the few works which are ' not for an age, but for all 

* I have already quoted this line from Wordsworth's Ode, in connection 
with this subject: but let me advise the reader to study the whole Ode, 
including the Title and the Motto, as a most instructive comment upon 
the whole spirit of prophecy, as exhibited by Isaiah ; and especially as to 
the relation between these latter chapters and the earlier ones. Our seer, 
like the Hebrew one, teaches us how to connect 'the pansy at our feet' with 
' truths that wake to perish never;' and to understand how 'our noisy 
years' may 'seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence.' 



THE FINITE AND THE INFINITE IDEALS. 325 



time.' He had, indeed, shown himself, by what he had done, 
well prepared for what yet remained. If he had reason, after 
delivering the Lokd's last message to Hezekiah, to exclaim with 
the Psalmist, * My spirit is overwhelmed within me ; my heart 
within me is desolate;' he knew how to add, 6 1 remember the 
days of old ; I meditate on all Thy works ; I muse on the work 
of Thy hands.'* And now that he had understood, and une- 
quivocally declared in the Lord's name, and as His prophet, 
that his early warnings that the cities of Judah should be with- 
out inhabitant, and the houses without man, and that the Lord 
should remove men far away, and there should be a great for- 
saking in the land, had not been fulfilled in the late years of 
calamity ; that there was still to come a captivity, not of many 
inhabitants, but of the nation and its king ; and a destruction, 
not of villages and towns, but of Jerusalem and the temple, 
when, in the words of his cotemporary, ' Zion should be ploughed 
as a field, and Jerusalem become heaps, and the mountain of 
the temple a forest, and the Daughter of Zion, the nation itself, 
should go forth out of the city, even to Babylon f ; ' he would be 
no less earnest to discover and to declare w T hen, and how, were 
to be realised his own corresponding promises that ' Zion should 
be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteous- 
ness ; that she should be called the city of righteousness, the 
faithful city; that in her should reign a king of the house of 
David, of the increase of whose government and peace there 
should be no end, and of which the blessings, spiritual no less 
than temporal, should not be limited to Israel, but extended to 
all nations, who should go up to the mountain of the Lord and 
to the house of the God of J acob to be taught of His ways, and 
to walk in His paths, and whom the Lord of hosts should bless, 
saying, Blessed be Egypt, my people, and Assyria, the work of 
my hands, and Israel, mine inheritance.' And the latter half of 
the book tells us the result : — that the human and finite ideals 
of his youth, which he had expected to see realised in the fruits 
of his own ministry and Hezekiah's reign, had faded (as all such 
ideals do) like the the flower of the field, though not till they 

* Psalm cxliii. 4, 5. 

| Tbe passage has been already quoted on the other side : the reader 
should consider its bearing both ways. 

y 3 



326 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



had served their purpose both for his countrymen and himself; 
but that to replace them there had been meanwhile maturing, 
and now was revealed to his purged and illumined eye, God's 
divine and infinite ideal of the destinies of Israel and mankind. 
His faith and hopes, and the whole tenour of his teaching, had 
from the first been based, not upon the merits of his nation, but 
upon God's original choice of them without any previous merit 
on their part, upon His good-will towards them, and upon His 
faithfulness in keeping the covenant He had made with them, 
however they might break it : and this purpose of goodness, of 
free grace, must remain still, and could as little be overcome by 
new sins as by the old ones. And yet what could kings and 
any prophets do more, nay, what could God Himself do, that He 
had not done, to effect it in the face of such inveterate resist- 
ance, and even incapacity ? The answer, we may be sure, came 
to Isaiah through that diligent inquiry with which St. Peter, 
who entered so heartily into the spirit of the great and good of 
his own people, tells us it was the habit of the prophets to 
' search what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ 
which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the 
sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.'* He would 
ask himself what, more than he had hitherto supposed, was con- 
tained in those predictions which he had been moved to utter f 
when he and his disciples were, not only sharing the calamities 
which overwhelmed the nation at the beginning of the reign of 
Ahaz, but also bearing the contempt and persecutions of their 
unbelieving countrymen — to the effect that they were to look 
for relief and triumph, to the birth of a Child of the house of 
David, whose name should be called ' Wonderful, Counsellor, 
the Mighty God : ' and thus meditating upon these, and all the 
rest of his past prophecies, he would have been — we see that 
he actually was — at last prepared to receive, and to make 
known, a still more glorious revelation of God's counsels than 
had yet been made to him. This declared that the invisible 
Lord and Guide of the nation would come in His own person 
and effect that deliverance which His most pious representatives 
were unequal to accomplish, by bearing the sins of the nation 
as they could not be borne by any other king or prophet, how- 
ever devoted to suffer, and to do all things for the nation's sake : 

* 1 Peter, i, 10, 11, t Chapters viii. ix, 



IDEA AND METHOD OF THE WHOLE BOOK. 327 

and that out of this deliverance should spring, not a mere resto- 
ration and re-establishment of the kingdom of Israel under the 
Branch of the Stem of Jesse, but a universal kingdom, and one 
which in order to be universal would be spiritual, established in 
the hearts and lives of its subjects; and, therefore, no longer 
dependent on outward circumstances of national peace and pro- 
sperity for its development ; but able, if need were, to found, 
and continually expand, itself, in spite, nay by help, of the ab- 
sence of these things. 

The idea of the whole Book of Isaiah is the same — God's 
government of Israel and mankind according to the laws which 
He has given for all their relations to Himself and to each other : 
but in the first part he is always seeking for, and setting forth, 
this idea in the events of his own times ; and in the second half 
he contemplates the idea in itself, and only embodies it in such 
shadowy anticipations as to the outward form of the glorious 
but indefinite future, as his poetic imagination can project from 
the facts and probabilities of his own time ; though into these 
shadowy forms he throws himself so completely, that it is often 
very hard for us not to think that they are the realities, and he 
— Isaiah — imaginary. This, I believe, is the real clue to that 
mixture of visionary indistinctness and historical literalness, 
which enables the advocates of the Pseudo-Isaian theory, and 
their opponents, each to make out so good a case : and, if so, 
what the reader wants is, not to decide between two rival sets 
of arguments, either of which may any day be replaced by 
another which the old victor cannot resist, but by frequent and 
prolonged meditation on the book itself, to acquire, if possible, 
the power of putting himself in the prophet's position, and look- 
ing at things as he looked at them. He must try and realise 
what Pope meant when, with a poet's feeling, he described 
Isaiah as e the bard rapt into future times ; ' and what St. Peter, 
who gives us the true theological, as the other does the true 
human side, meant by saying, that c it was revealed to the pro* 
phets, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister 
the things which are now preached to us in the gospel, with the 
Holy Ghost sent down from heaven?'* This realisation is dif- 



* 1 Peter, i. 12. 
y 4 



328 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



ficult, and can only be hoped for by help of that same guidance 
which led the Apostle thither, and which always supplies — even 
to the most prosaic — so much of the poetic faculty as the end 
demands. No mere logical or literary criticism will bring a man 
far on this road, still less do as a substitute for his actually taking 
the journey himself; but, perhaps, some of the obstacles at first 
setting off may be cleared away by such considerations as I 
have already suggested on the present, and previous occasions, 
and to which I now venture to make one or two additions. 

The progress of the universe under God's plan has brought 
us to a very different position, and point of view, from that where 
the ancient world stood : we too have a future before us (and in 
these very days a wider and more glorious future is opening 
than mankind has yet seen), but much of their future has be- 
come our past ; and we look back on great accomplished facts, 
and fixed starting points for our progress, which to them were 
still unrealised ideals, — buildings of which they were to announce 
the plans, but not themselves to lay the foundations, much less 
to begin our task, which is to raise the superstructure, now that 
their children and our fathers have done that intermediate work. 
This is more or less the case with all ancient history ; but especi- 
ally so with that of the Hebrews, which is a perpetual prophecy, 
and looking forward to what should come afterwards from all that 
the nation was doing then in a corner. It is easy enough to get 
rid of any amount, more or less according to individual taste, 
of the meaning either of particular parts, or of the whole tenour 
of Hebrew thought and feeling, laws and institutions; but such 
criticism is childish as well as dishonest. We do not want to 
get rid of, but to enter into, the meaning of the ancient oracles 
of c the seed of the woman,' and 6 the seed of Abraham ;' and 
to read and think ourselves into the prophetic spirit of the books 
of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, and not to trifle with those modern 
falsifications of the text which so ingeniously prove the text to be 
itself the falsification. And as I have already noticed, the way in 
which Isaiah here projects himself into the future, is not to be set 
aside as fictitious, because it somewhat varies from that which 
he, and other prophets, adopt on other occasions. These critics 
select their facts by the test of a merely nineteenth-century 3 



FACTS FOR INDUCTIONS ON PROPHECY. 



329 



European, notion of the human mind and its capacities, and 
that not derived from the best philosophy ; and having thus 
excluded all such specimens of Plebrew prophecy as the 50th 
and 51st chapters of Jeremiah*, as well as the chapters of 
Isaiah now before us, and those earlier ones which have been 
pointed out as they occurred, they frame, by induction from the 
remaining materials, a theory by which to test the others. But 
while I agree that some previous examination and selection of 
facts is necessary on such occasions, I must repeat that this is no 
fair or scientific performance of the duty. The difficulty of the 
word Cyrus, and of the historical tone of parts of these chapters, 
is not cleared up, but only put in a new, if not aggravated 
shape, by the supposition of the late origin of the text : and 
though modern experience affords us no instance of such a pro- 
jection not merely of the mind, but (so to speak) of the person, 
of a writer into the future, as is supposed in those chapters of 
Jeremiah, the others of Isaiah, and above all, these before us, — ■ 
yet the analogous power which Shakspeare habitually exercises, 
of so identifying himself with an indefinite variety of times and 
persons, that no criticism has ever been able to distinguish him 
from them, is proof enough that there is nothing incredible, no- 
thing non-human, in such a representation of the prophetic fa- 
culty, as they exhibit, if we accept them as genuine, with the 
single emendation, or explanation, given above. And therefore 
we have a right to take the one as well as the other set of facts 

— the one as well as the other phenomena of prophecy — as the 
basis of our induction : and if the old orthodox view is then 
shown to have been too limited, and to require modification as 
well as expansion, we may yet be sure, that in proportion as it 
is the more positive and matter-of-fact, so it is the truer and more 
scientific; and that we shall find that the new will harmonise 
with the old, in proportion as we enlarge — not our theories but 

— our basis of facts, and inductions from facts. 

* Gesenius admits the genuineness of these ; Ewald denies it, more con- 
sistently with their common theory. 



330 



HEBREW POLITICS* 



Note to Page 317. 

The question is not, as Strauss puts it, one of ' pre- suppositions, 1 but 
of facts. Strauss says, that his mind being free from all pre-suppositions 
except that of the amenability of all events to law, which is no presupposi- 
tion, unless it can be denied, he has a right to regard the believing pre- 
suppositions of theologians as unscientific. (Engl, trans, i. x. 73, 74.) But 
the theologian will be unsound, as well as weak, who replies, as Strauss 
expects, that ' this absence of pre- supposition is unchristian : ' the one 
question between him and Strauss is, whether the latter reasoner's mode of 
applying that general law, of the amenability of all events to law, does 
explain all the facts it meets with. If it does not ; if it is obliged to ignore 
many facts, and leave others without real explanation, in order to preserve 
an apparent truth and coherence for itself ; then we. have a right to say 
that, while quite ready to grant the universality of the law, we demur to 
this mode of applying it, because it is unscientific. For pre-suppositions, 
instead of being nothing, are every thing, in this New Theology. Thus, when 
Strauss (p. 71.) admits that the old sceptical way of putting the law of the 
invariable succession of finite causes and effects, ' although it does not 
exactly deny the existence of a God, yet puts aside the idea of him' .... so 
that he is ' no longer a God and Creator, but a mere finite Artist, who acts 
immediately upon his work only during its first production, and then leaves 
it to itself ;' and when he proposes to supersede both this, and the ancient 
and modern ' views of supernaturalism,' by enouncing the hypothesis that 
' God acts upon the world as a Whole immediately, but on each part only 
by means of his action on every other part, that is to say, by the laws of 
nature ;' we are struck with a kind of imposing grandeur, which promises 
to fill and satisfy the mind. But bring the words to the test, by asking them 
what they mean, and you soon find that ' though' (in Bacon's words) ' they 
have a show of strength, in that each part seemeth to support and sustain 
the others, yet this is more satisfactory than substantial.' Who can dis- 
cover any fact of which the phrase, ' God acts upon the world as a Whole, 
immediately,' is the expression ; who can deny that the rest of the sentence 
ignores — ' pre-supposes' the non-existence of — those facts of conscious- 
ness, the sense of sin, the sense of pardon, the gift of God's Spirit, His 
answers to prayer, His creation and building up of a new life in the soul ? 
While the supporters of the applicability of positive investigation to moral 
and intellectual, as well as physical, subjects, agree with Strauss that all 
theological or theoretical dogmas must be eliminated from the province of 
true philosophy, they add, that all metaphysical theories must follow ; and 
that a science of facts, and laws discoverable in facts, must and will super- 
sede both. And the Christian, who holds the faith of Paul and Luther, 
says the same ; and stands only on facts, — facts of history and facts of con- 
sciousness. It is not denied (by the highest English authorities) that the 
latter, the facts of consciousness, are no less real and cognisable than those 



NOTE ON STIIAUSS. 



331 



of sense ; provided only that they are facts : and the Christian can appeal to 
such a series of experiments, in his own heart, and in the Church for two, 
nay four, thousand years,— to such examinations into the reality of these 
facts, — as nothing else has ever been subjected to, in any department of that 
nature which Bacon has taught us must be ' bound, and tortured, pressed, 
formed, and turned out of her course by art and industry,' if we will 
thoroughly sift facts from notions. If the doctrine of the amenability of all 
facts to law, will not take in these facts, the fault must be in it, not in the facts : 
but the remedy is, not to get rid of the doctrine altogether, but to re-state 
it in a less narrow and one-sided manner, so that it may comprehend the 
one as well as the other — the spiritual as well as the natural — set of facts. 
And this the Bible, and only the Bible, teaches us the way of doing effectu- 
ally, by its distinctions between man and the world, and between the laws of 
nature and the laws of spirit. 

Again : Strauss (after assuming, as undeniable, Hume's doctrine of the 
absolute incompatibility of a single miracle with a scientific theory of the 
world, which English thinkers consider quite superseded by Mr. J. S. Mill's 
argument on the subject) states - — with certain, no doubt unintentional, 
mistakes — the view of those who maintain the old Christian faith in the 
language of modern philosophy ; and replies to their assertion that the object 
of that faith is at once the historical Jesus, and Christ dwelling in the heart, 
that on the one hand ' it cannot be proved that that inward experience is 
not to be explained without the actual existence of such a Christ,' and that 
on the other an historical individual cannot present the perfect and arche- 
typal ideal : and he offers us, instead of what he thus takes away, his 
grand theory of the 'idea of humanity,' which is ' alone the absolute sense 
of Christology.' But we are no more concerned to answer him, than we 
should be to prove the reality of the sun to some one who offered to explain 
the phenomena of our experience by an ' idea ' of warmth or light : we have 
only to state the fact, and say with St. John, We know that the Son of God 
is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is 
true ; and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. 

I am unacquainted with M. Comte's work on the application of ' Positi- 
visme' to Christianity: but no thoughtful Christian can read Mr. Grote's 
chapters on the religious faith of the ancient Greeks, as seen in the light of 
positive science, without hearing the ' mutato nomine de te fabula nar- 
ratur' ring in his ears at every step, and recognising an attack upon his 
Christian faith, by the side of which those of Strauss and his speculative 
school shrink into insignificance. But positive science is not the less the 
Christian's one trustworthy weapon of controversy, for all that. He must 
meet Mr. Grote's ' pre-supposition' that the Lord of Abraham, and of us 
men, women, and children throughout Christendom, is a creation of man's 
imagination, like J upiter or Apollo, — by the tact that He is the Living 
God. 



332 



HEBREW POLITICS, 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE VISION OF THE CAPTIVITY AND DELIVERANCE. THE TRANSITORY AND THE 

PERMANENT. GOD IN NATURE, AND IN HUMAN SOCIETY. THE POWERLESS 

GODS OF THE NATIONS. THE JEWISH INSTITUTION OF THE REDEEMER. ITS 

EFFECT ON THE MORE ENLIGHTENED JEWS. THE DELIVERER, KING, AND 

TEACHER. THE WORK OF ISAIAH AND HEZEKIAH. — ITS SUCCESS AND ITS 

FAILURE. JEWISH IDEA OF THE MESSIAH. ITS RELATION TO THEIR POLI- 
TICAL LIFE. ATONEMENT A HUMAN FACT. A RATIONAL IDEA. — UNION OF 

HALF-TRUTHS. THE MESSIAH OF THE GOSPEL. THE PROPHETS AND THE 

APOSTLES. ISAIAH'S SCIENCE OF POLITICS HIS DEATH HIS TRIUMPH. 

Or the manifest continuity of these twenty-six chapters, it 
has been well said that * the whole flows on like a river, poured 
forth at one time from a breast entirely possessed and filled by 
the Holy Spirit : ? and we might add, that the frequent repeti- 
tion of the same thoughts, resembling the rise and fall of the 
waves, while the stream holds its steady, onward, course, is among 
the indications that the inspired seer speaks as the vision rises 
before his illumined eye, and as the Word of the Lord impels 
him to describe it ; and that he did not sit down to write with 
any systematic and deliberate arrangement of all that he had to 
say. If this repetition seems excessive on one point — the ab- 
surdity of idolatry — we may remember that reason and history 
unite to teach us the great practical importance of the eradi- 
cation of this vice from the heart of the Jewish people. If to 
effect this was, as is probable, the main object of the Babylonish 
captivity, and an object worth attaining even by such severity, 
it was worth also the prophet's pertinacity, at the cost of a little 
literary elegance. 

The first two verses of chapter xl. form an introduction, in 
which the prophet throws himself into the future, beyond the 
end of the great national judgment foretold in the last chapter : 
and whether our idiom will or will not bear the literal transla- 
tion of the future form of the original, which is not / saith your 



VISION OF THE CAPTIVITY AND DELIVERANCE. 333 



God,' but 'your God shall say,' Calvin must be right in noticing 
that it has an appropriate emphasis. 

The great desert between Babylon and Judea suggests the 
like imagery with that which Isaiah had already employed to 
express the like idea in chapter xxxv. : and probably both here, 
and there, may be traced an under-thought of the passage of 
Israel through the wilderness when he came out of Egypt. But 
the prophet's language now is more ideal then before ; and we 
shall exclude a main part, if not the whole, of his meaning, if 
we introduce arbitrary limitations to define what he leaves inde- 
finite, and pronounce, more positively than his own words do, 
that he supposes himself in Babylon, or Jerusalem, or the De- 
sert; or that he does, or does not, represent the Lord as bring- 
ing back the captive nation from the former city. The period 
is no doubt that of the Captivity, and not of the reign of Heze- 
kiah ; but the words and images of the prophet show that his 
eye glances from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven, 
with little restraint of time and place: with the ubiquity of 
genius and of inspiration, he sees the appointed term of Israel's 
hard warfare arrived ; he hears the herald of their approaching 
Lord ; he calls on Jerusalem and Zion, themselves free and 
rejoicing in a moment, to spread the good tidings among the 
other cities of Judah, and to declare that this Lord is their 
own King, and their God. What enemies He has been triumph- 
ing over, what deliverance He has been effecting, whether He 
comes alone to a people already waiting to receive Him, or is 
bringing them with Him, redeemed or recovered from captivity, 
the vision defines not : but it sees that the triumph will be com- 
plete, and the glory manifest ; that the Loud God will do the 
whole work that has to be done ; and earn the effectual deliver- 
ance of His people ; and that, with a love no less tender than 
His power is strong, 

He shall feed His flock like a shepherd : 
He shall gather the lambs with His arm, 
And carry them in His bosom ; 
And shall gently lead the nursing ewes. 

The prophet sees into the dark night of the future only by 
momentary flashes of light ; but his vision is still farther inter- 



334 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



rupted by the doubt expressed in verses 6 and 7., where he seems 
to ask, How can these promises of God be more effectual now 
than before, when, after they had been made in a manner appa- 
rently so ample, we saw them all nullified by that act of Heze- 
kiah ? And the other voice within him, - — c voices of two dif- 
ferent natures,' — replies, that it is true that man is at best so 
weak and sinful, that if God leaves him for a moment, to try 
him, and to know all that is in his heart, he falls away as cer- 
tainly as the grass withers when the wind of heaven blows on 
it : but what then? e The grass with ere th, the flower fadeth; 
but the Word of our God shall stand for ever : ' that Word 
which in nature has been so efficacious, that every created thing 
still keeps the whole law and course which was imposed on it 
when, in the first day of its creation, God said, Let it be so, 
can and will be no less informative and quickening in the 
spirit of man. Isaiah looks on the whole Jewish polity, which 
had in his days attained to the highest development of which it 
was capable ; he sees and feels that not in this is there any con- 
tinuance, anything which can be really trusted in for strength, 
and righteousness, and eternal life ; and thus he is able to hear 
and understand the voice which declares that those things 
may and will fade like grass, yet that men may rise out of this 
transitory state, by laying hold on the permanence of God. 
And what the prophet thus implies, the apostle, in the fulness of 
time, could actually assert, when he quotes these words, and 
explains, that while man's corruptible nature is like the fading 
grass, the gospel preaches to us that we may be born again to a 
new and incorruptible life, by the Word of God ; and that thus 
being made partakers of the divine nature, we may each per- 
sonally escape the corruption which is in the world, and purify 
our souls in obeying the truth through the spirit ; and at the 
same time become members of a chosen generation, a royal 
priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.* 

Cicero could ask, tf When we look at the heavens, first in all 

* 1 Peter, i. 22. to il. 10. ; 2 Peter, i. 4. All the epistles indeed, from 
first to last, are nothing but expositions of the practical substitution, wrought 
by Christ, of the power of an endless life for the law of a carnal com- 
mandment. 



THE TRANSITORY AND THE PERMANENT. 335 

their unclouded beauty, and then with such rapid changes pass- 
ing over their face ; when we consider the alternations of day 
and night, and the succession of the four several seasons ; when 
we behold the sun which regulates all these, and the moon and 
and stars all keeping their courses with unfailing constancy ; 
can we doubt that some present and efficient Ruler is over 
them? 5 * And Seneca says, 6 They all continue, not because they 
are eternal, but because the watchfulness of their Governor 
protects them : imperishable things need no guardian ; but 
these are preserved by their Maker, who, by his power, con- 
trols their natural tendency to decay. ' f And Hume, though his 
philosophy was perhaps less profound than that of either Roman, 
could raise his hands to the starry sky, and show that he too 
had a human heart, by exclaiming to Fergusson, ( 0 Adam, 
how can a man look at that, and not believe in a God ! ' But 
Isaiah, while he here handles this argument with an eloquence 
sublimer and more earnest than any of theirs, does not stop in 
this 6 Court of the Gentiles,' but makes that assertion of the 
reality and power of the Creator which is their end, a step to 
his higher conclusion, that He is also the God of the spirits of 
men ; and that the wisdom and power which He exhibits in 
nature are but the symbols that ( He fainteth not, neither is 
weary, — there is no searching of His understanding,' in a region 
in which natural order and life are of no avail. It may seem at 
first as though this were to prove a higher by a lower attribute 
of God : but the works of creation have this special effect, that 
they bear witness that God is in Himself, and not merely in 
relation with us ; and then through this revelation, of an Abso- 
lute Being, in creation, we are the easier led on to apprehend 
the higher truth and fact of an Absolute God of our spirits, in 
whom we are to trust, even though this or that accustomed re- 
lation between Him and us seems to have failed. The pious 
Israelite, the Nation, the Church, must not suppose that, because 
their way is hid from themselves, and nothing appears but the 
oppression of utter desolation of spirit and circumstances, there- 
fore God does not see the way, and is not actually work- 
ing it out, and preparing to do His people right and justice, by 



* Tusc. Qucest. i. 



f Epist. lviii. 



336 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



methods not the less wise because they are for the time in- 
scrutable. Let man wait for God : — 

They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength ; 
They shall raise the wing, like eagles ; 
They shall run, and not be weary ; 
They shall walk, and not faint. 

In reply to Israel's complaint (xl. 27.) that his cause against 
the heathen oppressors is neglected or dismissed by the Great 
Judge, God now (chap. xli. 1.) summons the nations to His court 
of justice ; and as Israel had just been assured that, if they 
would wait upon the Lord, they would renew their strength, 
and discern His wisdom, an interval is granted to the heathens 
and their gods, in which they too may renew their strength, 
and have time to produce evidence of the powers of design and 
action possessed by their gods, and in virtue of which they claim 
the right to keep Israel in subjection. The solemn pause thus 
allowed — 6 Keep silence . . . : then let them speak ' — is filled 
(how bitter the irony !) by the nations employing their carpen- 
ters and goldsmiths to make a particularly good and strong set 
gods, because there is a general alarm that the emergency is 
great. For it is already seen that the judgment goes against 
them by default : that these gods can show no plans, can do 
nothing good or bad ; and that they, and their worshippers, have 
neither right nor power to break up the designs of Almighty 
Wisdom. They have been trying to do this, by those oppres- 
sions of Israel which were only permitted for a time, because 
they fell into and formed a part of God's own plan. But Israel 
had from the first an appointed and chief place in that plan : 
He who is at once King of Israel and God of all the earth, has 
been maintaining His chosen people in their place, generation 
after generation, when He made Abraham His friend, and gave 
the blessing to his seed, and when He made the rock yield 
springs of water under the rod of Moses : and now, though they 
are reduced to extremity of weakness and dismay, the Holy 
One of Israel bids them fear not, for He has taken upon Himself 
to be their Redeemer. 

In order to understand and realise the meaning and force of 



JEWISH INSTITUTION OF REDEEMER. 



337 



this word — Redeemer — throughout Isaiah's prophecies, as indeed 
wherever it occurs in the Hebrew books, we must consider what 
the institution and office of the ff Goel' or Redeemer, in the 
Hebrew commonwealth, actually was. It was a properly pa- 
triarchal office : yet, with a provision for the progressive as well 
as the conservative element, such as is not usually found in 
patriarchal institutions, it was an office which devolved rather 
on the elder brother than on the father; on the near and 
powerful kinsman of the rising generation, rather than on the 
head of the family. It was his duty, when any branch of the 
family fell into decay, to ransom both the patrimonial land and 
the enslaved owner; to avenge their blood when shed in feud; 
and to marry the childless widow, and so keep alive in Israel 
the name and line of her first husband. The Book of Ruth 
supplies liying lineaments to the legal enactments of Moses * : 
and when we once accustom ourselves to the Jewish point of 
view, and see the actual institution, and its workings, as they 
saw it, we shall perceive that these must have given the charac- 
teristics of a 6 Goel,' or Redeemer, to many a national hero, — 
to a Moses, a Joshua, or a Samson, as well as to a Joseph whom 
' God sent before ' his father's house, ' to preserve them a pos- 
terity in the earth, and to save them with a great deliverance.' 
Thus there grew up a distinct and well understood faith, in the 
minds of the more experienced and enlightened Jews, of an 
invisible Redeemer, of whom these were but the earthly and 
partial representatives. This faith we recognise in Jacob, when 
he invoked for Joseph's sons the guardianship of the s God who 
had fed him all his life long, and the Angel which had redeemed 
him from all evilf ; ' by Job, when he met the worst evils of the 
present time with the assertion, * I know that my Redeemer 
liveth :£ ; ' and by Isaiah, throughout the prophecies before us. 
Vitringa, after quoting these words of Jacob, and of Job, adds, 
' That under the Old Economy that Angel — the assertor and 
avenger — did not discharge the whole office to which He was 

* Leviticus, xxv. 24. ff. ; Numbers, xxxv. 19. ff. The word translated 
4 Avenger' in the latter passage is the same (Goel) as 'Redeemer' in the 
former. 

f Genesis, xlviii. 16. J Job, xix. 25. 

z 



338 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



destined : yet in every liberation of the people of God, and 
every vindication of their rights which He did effect, the Church 
might discern, as in a type, the preludings * of that office of 
Redeemer, which, by the will of the Father, He was to fulfil in 
the last times.' 

A Redeemer, or Deliverer, is appointed (chapter xlii.) to 
carry out the judgment pronounced upon the islands and nations 
just called to trial. And this judgment is farther explained to 
be, on the one hand, a moral conversion of the Gentiles by means 
capable of addressing their mind and spirit ; and on the other, a 
triumph over all irreclaimable rebels, by the Lord going forth as 
a man of war, and Himself making waste the mountains and 
hills, and giving occasion to the righteous, not only of Israel 
but also of the Gentiles, to give glory to Him, and to rejoice in 
the accomplishment of the great design of the universe which 
He alone, and none of the graven images, had framed from the 
beginning. But in the previous chapter (xli. 2.) there is an- 
other description of the same, or another, deliverer, variously 
interpreted to refer to Cyrus, to Abraham and his posterity, to 
Christ, or to the Gospel under the name of * righteousness : ' 
and — with reservation of the final decision as to ( Coresh ' — I am 
unable to exclude any of these meanings, here and in the like 
passages, or to explain their concurrence or interchange, ex- 
cept by recognising the whole as a vision or discourse in which 
the speaker has taken up an ideal position far removed from his 
actual one, and allows his imagination to carry him where it 
will, uncurbed by logical forms. It is generally true, that the 
more we can bring together the partial and divergent lights of 
the commentators of different periods and modes of thinking, 
and the more careful we are that it is on the simple text itself, 
and not on their statement of it, that we concentrate their rays, 
the more likely are we to get at least a glimpse of its real, 
adequate, meaning. And no where is this more the case than 
in these descriptions of the ( servant of God,' which fill so large 
a part of the rest of the book. The everlasting God, the Lord, 
the Creator of the ends of the earth, has from the beginning 

* Prceludebat huie officio. So an English divine speaks of " the preludings 
of the incarnation." 



THE DELIVERER, KING, AND TEACHER. 339 

planned, and brought into operation, a moral, political, spiritual 
constitution and order, as well as a physical world ; and He has 
chosen one nation for the first and normal embodiment and illus- 
tration of the design, and to be the main instrument for carrying 
it out in all other nations, and for uniting them in an universal 
brotherhood : and now that this nation has itself sunk under the 
evils out of which it was to lead the others, the original plan 
provides an adequate Redeemer and Guide for it and them. 
That the work extends over ages of time, employs races as well 
as individuals, and is in the main spiritual, and the work of 
God himself, is plainly declared by the prophet. If we choose 
to think that at one or two points of his vision he sees that one 
external portion of the work is to be effected by a Persian con- 
queror (though the other way of explaining the word gives the 
more coherent sense), yet in many more places he plainly looks 
either for a direct interposition of divine power, as in the over- 
throw of Sennacherib ; or else for the appearance of a hero 
like David, who will lead his people to fight their own battle. 
And side by side with this idea of the Redeemer, appear, 
throughout the book, those of the King, and the Prophet or 
Teacher : while each of these finds its counterpart in the an- 
swering images of Israel and the Church. The nation is re- 
deemed from Babylon, and from Edom, which is the symbol of 
Babylon, as Babylon is of all godless tyranny : it is established 
in a prosperity never known by Hezekiah or Solomon ; it is 
secured in possession of these blessings by a covenant that they 
shall have a more spiritual guidance than heretofore*: and all 
this is but the inmost circle of the ever-widening, universal, 
Church, which is indeed for the most part depicted as a political 
and social subordination of the Gentiles to Israel, but in more 
than one place as a real illumination and spiritual organisation 
of the Gentiles themselves, by the Lord of Israel, who employs 
His chosen people as instruments for that, the original end for 
which they were chosen. Thus, in chapter xlii. 6., c I, the 
Lord will give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light 
of the Gentiles ; ' and again, in chapter xlix. 6., 



* Chapter lix, 21. 
z 2 



340 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



And He said, 

It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant 

To raise up the tribes of Jacob, 

And to restore the preserved of Israel : 

I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, 

That thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth : — 

And, in chapter li., verses-4, 5, 6., the correspondence of which 
with the opening verses of chapter ii., is so marked, 

Hearken unto me, my people, 

And give ear unto me, O my nation : 

For a law shall proceed from me, 

And I will establish my judgment for a light of the peoples. 
My righteousness is near, my salvation is gone forth, 
And mine arms shall judge the peoples : 

The isles shall wait upon me ; and on mine arm shall they trust. 

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, 

And look upon the earth beneath : 

For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, 

And the earth shall wax old like a garment, 

And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner : 

But my salvation shall be for ever, 

And my righteousness shall not be abolished. 

If the reader will forgive some unavoidable repetition, he may 
perhaps find our subject still clearer, if we follow into farther 
detail that method — which, though as old as St. Peter, is as 
new as the most modern critical science, — of considering the 
prophet's meaning in the light in which he must have himself 
contemplated it ? and also in that in which it presents itself to us 
who live after the coming of Christ. Isaiah, meditating upon 
the experience of his past life, would find that the various qua- 
lifications of an adequate Redeemer, King, and Teacher, un- 
folded themselves before him, at the same time with his vision 
of the depressed and destitute state of Israel and the world, and 
of the divine and universal polity which was to be brought out 
of these. He had been called to the office of prophet, in the 
days of Uzziah, by the Lord, who had elected him to be 
His servant, and upheld him in his duty by continually c putting 



JEWISH IDEA OF THE MESSIAH. 



341 



His spirit upon him.'* He was endowed with e the tongue of the 
learned ' in no ordinary measure, and might have 4 made his 
voice to be heard in the streets,' while a sympathising audience 
approved his haughtiest eloquence, if he had only used it to 
enforce the maxims of worldly wisdom ; but he had not turned 
back from the harder task, of preaching and teaching in all hu- 
mility and patience the unpalatable doctrine of a holy, God- 
trusting life. He had taken care, neither to ' break the bruised 
reed, nor quench the smoking flax,' when his ministry produced 
some weak result ; nor to suffer his own spirit to be broken and 
quenched, when all result seemed wanting, and when he had to 
submit to be ( despised by man and abhorred by the nation f,' or 
even (like so many prophets before and after him J, and as was 
most probably his lot in the reign of Ahaz) to 4 give his back to 
the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair.' § 
And like other e preachers of righteousness in the great congre- 
gation ||,' he had protested continually against that abuse of the 
Levitical sacrifices which turned them into an opus operatum IF ; 
and like them, he had learnt that the meaning of these sacrifices 
must be realised by a man sacrificing himself, ( pouring out his 
soul,'** and that not for himself only, but for his brethren also. 
And Hezekiah — the king co-operating with the prophet in the 
work of national reformation — had, by a like life of toil and 
self-sacrifice, contended with the same, or corresponding, obstacles 
in his efforts to * bring forth justice in, and by, the force of 
truth,' and to e establish it in the land,' and e extend it to the 
nations' around. And lastly, the c Angel of the Lord' had 
destroyed the power of Sennacherib, and compelled him to let 
his captives return to their own land, there to enjoy peace and 
prosperity under their own king and laws, and to worship their 
own God in Zion. These ( former things had come to pass,' and 
Isaiah could distinguish the design and the hand of God in them, 

* Chapter xlii. 1. ff. 
f Chap. xlix. 7. 

% Matthew, xxiii. 29—39. ; Hebrews, xi. 35 — 38.; and the whole Jewish 
history to which these passages refer. 
§ Chap. 1. 4, 5, 6. 

|| Psalm xl. 6 — 10. See the whole passage 

T Chap. i. 11., xliii. 23. 24. ** Chapter liii. 12. 

z 3 



342 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



no less than in His creating the heavens, spreading out the 
earth, and giving breath to the people upon it : but he had also 
seen that the deliverance, and restoration, and reformation, ef- 
fected by these means were only temporary and external ; and 
thus he would be led by the Holy Spirit to perceive that a 
mightier Prophet than himself, a greater King than Hezekiah, 
a more effectual Redeemer than that Angel, was needed, and 
might be looked for ; and so the idea would dawn upon his in- 
ward eye, of the coming of One who could adequately fill all 
these offices, and really accomplish a work to which no mere 
man, or angel, was competent, however divinely directed and up- 
held. For observe — since in this we have the clue to the 
transition from the expectation of a human, to that of a Di- 
vine, Redeemer — that the work of Isaiah and Hezekiah, 
which had so failed of any but an external and temporary 
result, had not been itself external and temporary, but spiritual, 
and wrought by spiritual men, who made 6 righteousness the 
girdle of their loins, and faithfulness the girdle of their reins ;' 
and who had sacrificed themselves, and not bulls and goats, for 
their nation, and yet with no more efficacy than if it had been 
only the latter. Nothing better in degree, could supply the 
want : what man could do had been done, and it was now proved 
that something different in kind was required, something which 
could raise humanity above itself, 

6 And give to every power a double power, 
Above their functions and their offices.' 

And just in proportion as Isaiah, and those who heard his words, 
could enter into the meaning of this coming of the Messiah, the 
God-man, could they realise that they had, after all, a firm ground 
of faith and hope to stand on. The idea of the Messiah is the 
keystone of the arch of prophecy, and makes a living temple of 
Jewish history : he who had it, found it again possible to see a 
divine life and meaning in the office and acts of each particular 
king and prophet ; in the nation ; and in each of its constituted 
and corporate orders ; even while it could no longer be ques- 
tioned that they were all in themselves but transitory symbols. 
And thus, for us too, in like manner — if this prophecy of the 
* Servant of the Lord,' which is the central subject of these last 



ATONEMENT A RATIONAL IDEA. 



343 



twenty-six chapters of Isaiah, be clearly understood to speak 
properly, and directly, of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and 
the Son of David, it throws a clear light upon all the other 
interpretations which have been offered as substitutes for this. 
The ( Servant of the Lord ' has been explained to be Cyrus, 
Isaiah himself, Hezekiah, Josiah, Jeremiah, or some unknown 
prophet : the House of David, the Maccabees, the Jewish No- 
bles in the times of the Exile : the Priesthood, the Order of 
Prophets, the Jewish Nation, and the spiritual Israel, or Church 
in the nation : and it is very interesting and instructive to see 
how much reason may be adduced in favour of each of these 
interpretations, and yet how each is unable to hold its place, 
for more than a moment ; because each, though a shadow, is 
only a shado w, and a finite, as well as transient, image of the 
infinite and substantive Original. Let the words of the prophet 
be applied, in as far as they are applicable, to each of these, and 
to all other, ( preludings ' of the incarnation : it will not be the 
less true, it will be even the more manifest, that only in the 
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ were they fulfilled. 

It is not denied by their authors or advocates, that some of 
the interpretations of the 53rd chapter, above enumerated, are 
intended to supersede the belief that Jesus is the Christ, or that 
there is either Christ, or Prophecy, in the Christian sense ; and 
they say that they thus offer us a rational explanation, instead 
of an unintelligible dogma of theology. But we must not mis- 
take them, because they mistake us. They do recognise a 
valuable half-truth, which theologians have too much over- 
looked ; and the neglect of which has made the Christian idea of 
the Atonement seem too much like an arbitrary dogma, when 
it might have been shown as well as felt (for the latter it always 
has been) to be the fullest and most luminous manifestation of 
an universal law, and one with which, in its lower operations, 
we are all more or less acquainted, The passage I have already 
referred to in the 40th Psalm, is enough for mere logical proof 
that the idea of self-sacrifice for others, as the highest and most 
effective duty, was intelligible to the more enlightened at least 
of the ancient Hebrews ; but if any one has any difficulty in 
realising how Isaiah could, nay must, have given the words of 
this 53rd chapter, a sound, coherent sense, derived from his 

z 4 



344 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



own experience and observation, I would pray him to look into 
his own experience and observation in the matter. The soft 
answer which restores good humour in a casual conversation ; 
the forbearance with which the statesman meets the ignorances 
and prejudices, the censures and the slanders, of those to whom 
he only sues for leave to do them good ; the work of the mi- 
nister of the Gospel, of which St. Paul, among other hardly 
less strong expressions, asserts that ( he fills up that which is 
behind of the afflictions of Christ ;' * are but instances of an 
universal law of man's constitution, discoverable in all human 
relationships, and which enacts that men can, and do, endure 
the evil doings of their brethren, in such sort that, through that 
endurance on the part of the innocent, the guilty are freed from 
the power — from both the guilt and the punishment — of their 
ill deeds. And if these instances seem insignificant or foreign, 
there is one which, in some form or other, must have come 
home to the heart of every one not deficient in the commonest 
observation and sympathies. There is hardly any one but has 
known some household in which, year after year, selfishness and 
worldliness, and want of family affection, have been apparent 
enough ; and yet, instead of the moral break-up which might 
have been expected, and the final moral ruin of the various 
members, the original bond of union has held together : there 
has plainly been some counteracting, redeeming, power at work ; 
and at last it has turned out that, not only has the course of that 
household not been downward to ruin, but has taken a new and 
upward direction, when some outward event, a death, or a mar- 
riage, brought to a crisis the elements of a change long ma- 
turing in secret. This, I say, is the commonest of all stories ; 
and when we look again to see what is that redeeming power, 
ever at work for those who know and care nothing about it, we 
always find that there is some member of that family — oftenest 
the wife or mother — who is silently bearing all things, believing 
all things, hoping all things, for them, but for her or himself 
expecting little or nothing in this world, but the rest of the 
grave. Such a one is really bearing the sins of that household, 
and thus saving them from the guilt as well as punishment of 
sin: it is no dogma, no forensic phrase transferred by way of 
* Colossians, i. 24. 



ATONEMENT A HUMAN FACT. 



345 



illustration from the practice of the law courts ; but a fact, a 
vital formation, actually taking place, here, under our very eyes. 
He who has seen and understood this fact, in any one of its 
common, daily, shapes, needs no commentary on such words 
as — 

His visage was so marred more than any man, 

And his form more than the sons of men : — 

He hath no form, nor comeliness ; and when we shall see him, 

There is no beauty that we should desire him. 

He is despised and rejected of men, 

A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief : 

And we hid as it were our faces from him ; 

He was despised, and we esteemed him not. 

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows ; 

Yet did we esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. 

But he was wounded for our transgressions, 

He was bruised for our iniquities : 

The chastisement of our peace was upon him ; 

And with his stripes we are healed. 

All we like sheep have gone astray ; 

We have turned every one to his own way ; 

And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. 

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, 

Yet he opened not his mouth : 

As a lamb is brought to the slaughter, 

And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, 

So he opened not his mouth. 

He was taken from prison and from judgment : 

And who among his generation will consider, 

That he was cut off, out of the land of the living, 

For the transgression of my people, — stricken for them. 

And he made his grave with the wicked, 

And with the rich in his death ; 

Though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. 

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him ; He hath put him to grief: 

When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, 

He shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, 

And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 

He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied : 

By his knowledge shall my righteous servant j ustify many ; 



346 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



And their iniquities shall he bear. 

Therefore will I divide him a portion with the many, 

And he shall divide the spoil with the strong ; 

Because he hath poured out his soul unto death, 

And was numbered with the transgressors ; 

And he bare the sin of many, 

And for the transgressors will make intercession. 

We may notice the expression 6 It pleased the Lord' to bruise 
him, which, according to the usual Hebrew spirit, and way of 
looking at things, is equivalent to our saying that it is an ulti- 
mate fact, the original seat of a law. And without pretending 
to any metaphysical depth or accuracy, I may help to make my 
meaning intelligible, by saying, that this law is, that one human 
will can unite itself with another, and raise up the latter out of 
a state of sin and misery, not otherwise to be escaped from, if it 
(the former) consents and submits to be accounted a partaker in 
the guilt, and therefore, to be actually made a sharer in the misery 
of that other. But it is a part of the same law, — every instance 
that can be produced will show it — that no man can thus bear 
the sins of another, unless he be himself blameless in the matter 
then in hand. In the minor and more outward relationships and 
duties of life, this qualification of blamelessness is to be found 
of the kind required ; for there are virtuous as well as vicious 
men in the world : but when we go a little deeper, we discover 
a difficulty which threatens to invalidate all our philosophy, 
if we attempt to reduce it to practice. Every man, the most 
virtuous, the meekest, holiest, most loving, no less than the most 
selfish and vicious, is at bottom a sinner; has that inherent 
defect and corruption in him which we call original sin ; and is 
thereby disqualified from this which — as we have said — is the 
only way in which man can be saved out of the guilt and misery 
in which he has involved every relationship of his life. What- 
ever we may have seen the minister of religion, the patriot, the 
wife, or the mother, doing, and doing with success, we have in 
the back ground the certainty that their good works must be out- 
flanked at last, because the evil which they are saving others 
from is still there, in themselves : the end may be put off, but 
must come at last, which the prophet expresses, when he says, 



THE MESSIAH OF THE GOSPEL, 



347 



'I looked, and there was none to help.' And thus we arrive 
once more, as Isaiah arrived before us, at the necessity for the 
coming of One who, because He is God as well as man, is free 
from this defect ; and, therefore, can bear the sins of the whole 
world, and of each man in it, without failing in the last resort. 
And thus, and then, each Christian minister, each Christian 
ruler, each Christian member of a family, will and does receive 
power to do that in his lower sphere, which has first been done 
for him in the higher. And thus man, made in the image of 
God the Creator, is renewed in the image of God the Saviour ; 
and can reflect that image among his brethren, having the 
mind of Christy and being a fellow-worker with Him.* 

Thus we do justice to the half-truth, the finite, human, 
element, in the Jewish and rationalist interpretations, and at 
the same time bring the Christian interpretation, with its whole 
truth, human and divine in one, into fuller light than if we 
overlooked or denied the former. And this is not less the case 
as to the explanation that the 4 Servant of the Lord ' means the 
Jewish Nation. What was true of the King of the nation, its 
real Head and Representative, must be true of the nation itself, 
in as far as it acknowledged Him, walked in His light, was 
clothed with His righteousness, and actuated by His Spirit. The 
history of the foundation of the Church by Jesus Christ and 
His Apostles, all Jews, and the fact that the Bible is wholly a 
Jewish book, show how truly and how peculiarly the law came 
forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, to 
all nations ; while the same thing was partially and symbolically 
effected in the preceding ages of the people. And then, when 
they 6 would not have this man to rule over them,' it became 
inevitable that they should bear their own sins, which they re- 
fused to let Him bear for them ; and it may, therefore, well be 
possible to trace a close resemblance between this prophetic de- 
scription of the sufferings of the Messiah, with those which the 
pride and rebellion of the nation have brought upon themselves. 
And it is interesting, and illustrative, that the Jews not only ex- 
cluded the Messiah from their interpretation, as far at least as 



Philipp. ii. 4—11. 



348 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



the 53rd chapter is concerned, in order to hold their ground 
better against their Christian opponents who urged on them 
that it was fulfilled in the sufferings of Jesus the Son of Mary ; 
but that the periods of history in which the persecutions of the 
Jews have been most cruel, are (it is said) those in which their 
writers are found to dwell most earnestly, and with a view to 
the practical instruction of the people themselves, upon this in- 
terpretation. They felt how terribly real its application to 
themselves was. 

The manner in which the New Testament writers assume this 
prophecy to refer to Jesus Christ *, seems to indicate that, as the 
Holy Spirit led them into all truth, and opened their eyes to 
understand the meaning of Moses and the Prophets, — the 
records of God's counsels and works — they perceived, on the 
one hand, what the character of the Messiah must be in order to 
His filling the proper place in those counsels, and, on the other, 
how this very character was actually exhibited, in all its parts, 
in the life and conversation of their Master. And thus the two, 
the idea and the answering fact, united so simply and naturally 
in their minds, that there seemed no occasion to assert — it was 
enough to notice — the reality of the union. 

There is, in our day, a growing disinclination to attend to 
those minute correspondences between these words of Isaiah, 
and the details of our Lord's death and burial, which were 
once thought (by Paley for instance) so important a part of the 
evidences of Christianity. It would be easy to suggest grounds 
for thinking that our philosophy may be as one-sided as that of 
our fathers in this respect. The course of the universe, the 
working out by God of His original design, has its harmonies, 
and its relations of the parts to each other and to the whole ; 
and the time is coming — I might say, come — when each of 
these partial relations must be seen in its harmony with the 
whole, or remain uninstructive, nay, unintelligible, to us. But, 
meanwhile, we are neither to fancy the higher relations where 
we cannot, nor deny the lower to exist because we do not, see 
them. One advantageous effect of this diminished interest in 

* Matthew, viii. 17. ; John, xi. 51. ; Acts, viii. 32. ; 1 Peter, ii. 23, 24, 25. 



isaiah's science of politics. 349 

the literal fulfilment of prophecy, we may notice, in the in- 
creased importance which it has allowed prophecy itself — as 
distinguished from that literal fulfilment — to take. We can 
answer better than our fathers could, the question, what Pro- 
phecy was given for : whether it had not some place of its own, 
some specific purpose ? For if God's purpose in giving it to us 
had been to supply a ground for such arguments as Paley builds 
upon it, it would surely have been much more explicit and 
literal : and again, if the spiritual and practical light to be 
gained from it were exactly the same as that which the New 
Testament expositions throw on the death of Christ, — and this 
would be so, if the one, like the other, is a statement and expo- 
sition of facts — then one or the other part of the Bible becomes 
superfluous. But when we see that Prophecy is the setting 
forth of God's Design, as a Design, we can recognise the method 
of the Bible, and find that each part of the revelation has its 
proper meaning, and power of throwing light on the rest. And 
this 53rd chapter of Isaiah, in particular, exhibits the idea of 
the Atonement, as an Idea. The facts are recorded in the 
Gospels and Acts. The Epistles declare and expound the 
union of the facts with the idea. And, if we will fully under- 
stand them in this union, we must also understand, and, there- 
fore, study them, separately; for which this provision has been 
made by God. 

Induction of the law, from the events of his own time : de- 
duction therefrom of a future realisation of that law in universal 
society : — such are Isaiah's contributions to the science of 
politics ; while to those who have come after him belongs the 
verification required to complete the circle. And in following 
Isaiah in this his method, and then doing our own part, we find, 
along with a science of politics, a canon of positive criticism, 
which enables us to investigate the question of the genuineness 
of the book, without excluding historical evidence, or calling in 
hypothesis to supply its place. I have shown at so great length 
the applicability of this method in both respects, in reference to 
the central subject of Isaiah's whole writings — the Holy One of 
Israel — that I may best leave the reader to follow it out through 
the other kindred subjects of which these last twenty-six chap- 
ters treat, venturing to assure him that he will find it hold good 



350 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



in these no less than in that. The sinful state of the nation, 
and its punishment by exile to Babylon ; the destruction of the 
oppressor, and deliverance of the captives ; the restoration of 
the nation not merely to outward prosperity, but to, and by, a 
spiritual life sustained by the constant presence of their Lord, 
while the irreclaimable are cast out that they may no longer 
pollute the renewed people ; and the extension of this regene- 
rated society, till it grows from a chosen nation into an 
universal Church, of which the Lord, the King of Israel, is the 
Head : — all these, in their various aspects, and with the means 
by which they are to be brought about, the diligent student will 
find set forth by Isaiah as they rose before him in vision ; while 
at the same time he will be able to trace into its details the 
evidence that this vision, in all its parts, had its counterpart in 
the events of the prophet's own times, and that it was his insight 
into the meaning of that actual world, which made possible to 
him, and makes intelligible to us, his foresight into the ideal : — 
ideal to him, but actual to us who are e no more strangers and fo- 
reigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the house- 
hold of God ; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles 
and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone; 
in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an 
holy temple in the Lord : in whom we also are builded together 
for an habitation of God through the Spirit.'* 

Authentic history has preserved no account of the death of 
Isaiah : but there is no improbability in the Jewish tradition 
that he was one of the martyrs whose f innocent blood Ma- 
nasseh shed, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to the 
other' f , and that the mode of his death was by being sawn 
asunder, to which the Christian fathers understood reference to 
be made in Hebrews xi. 37. If Isaiah was twenty years old 
when he began his ministry, in the last year of the reign of 
Uzziah, he would have been eighty at the death of Hezekiah. 
Hengstenberg supposes these latter prophecies to have been 
written in the days of Manasseh ; and it must be admitted that 
there is one passage at least in them, which supports this view, 



* Ephesians, ii. 19—22. 



f 2 King?, xxi. 16. 



HIS DEATH, AND TRIUMPH. 



351 



— chap. lvi. 9. to lvii. 12., — both in its general picture of the 
state of society, and in the allusion to the death of the righteous, 
as taking him away from the evil to come, which cannot but 
remind us of Hezekiah, and his melancholy consolation that 
there should be peace and truth in his days. But political and 
social changes are not made in a moment ; and coming events 
would have cast their shadows on the last days of Hezekiah and 
Isaiah, and have made this langniasfe suitable in the mouth of 
the prophet, even though we should prefer to believe that he, 
as well as the king, was spared the actual sight of the evil. 
To the objection that, if Isaiah had written in the days of 
Manasseh, that king's name would have appeared with the 
others in the title of the Book, it might be replied that death 
must always prevent an author from putting the very last stroke 
to the collection of his works ; and it might even be argued 
that there are other indications that such last finish i3 wanting 
in the minor arrangements of these twenty-six chapters. But 
it is unnecessary to refine so much, when we cannot get at 
certainty after all. The last days, like the last words, of the 
prophet, pass from the actual into the ideal ; and whether the 
final act of his life was, like its whole previous course, a surrender 
of himself to suffer for his people, or whether he was permitted 
a foretaste, in the repose of an honoured death-bed, of the 
eternal rest that awaited him when all his worldly task was 
done, he was secure in the covenant, and promise, which he 
had habitually realised for himself, while he declared them to 
others : — 



Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, 
And thy health shall spring forth speedily : 
And thy righteousness shall go before thee ; 
The glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward. 
Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer, 
Thou shalt cry, and He shall say, Here I am. 

And thou shalt know that I the Lord am thy Saviour, 
And thy Redeemer the mighty One of Jacob. 
For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, 
And for wood brass, and for stones iron : 
And I will make thy government peace, 
And thy rulers righteousness. 



352 



HEBREW POLITICS. 



Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, 

Wasting nor destruction within thy borders ; 

But thou shalt call thy walls, Salvation ; and thy gates, Praise. 

The sun shall be no more thy light by day, 

Neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee. 

But the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, 

And thy God thy glory. 

Thy sun shall no more go down, 

Neither shall thy moon withdraw itself, 

For the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, 

And the days of thy mourning shall be ended. 



In the interval between my writing and printing these pages, Mr. 
Maurice has published his Sermons on the Prophets and Kings of the Old 
Testament, in which he has more than once effected by a few broad strokes 
of genius, what I have laboured to produce by careful detail. I have not 
now first to acknowledge how greatly I owe to Mr. Maurice my principles 
and method of considering Hebrew prophecy; but their application is my 
own, as indeed the differences in the midst of resemblances might show. Of 
this the reader may, if he pleases, find proof in the Educational Magazine 
for 1840, which contains, in Letters on the Bible, my first sketch of the views 
which I have now worked out, as to the historical meaning of Isaiah's pro- 
phecies, and the relation between the later and earlier parts of the book. 



APPENDIX. 



THE 

ENGLISH TEXT 

OF THE 

BOOK OF ISAIAH. 



[My design is not, nor am I competent, to give a new and 
independent Translation of the Prophecies of Isaiah: but I have 
thought it convenient for the reader of the previous pages to 
have the English Text for reference, within the same volume ; 
and for this purpose I have carefully emended our Authorized 
Version. I have taken this Version, as it stands in that every 
way excellent edition — the small Paragraph Bible of the Reli- 
gious Tract Societv, and have gone through it with Professor 
Alexander's literal and critical translation, adopting one or 
other of the emendations there given, when there seemed no 
doubt : but when not satisfied with these, I have consulted the 
chief modern versions (many of which I had previously com- 
pared throughout) : and occasionally I have ventured to prefer 
my own rendering of the Hebrew word.] 



APPENDIX. 



Isaiah I. 

1 The Vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw con- 

cerning Judah and Jerusalem in the Days of Uzziah, 

JOTHAM, AhaZ, AND HEZEK1AH, KINGS OF JUDAH. 

2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth : 
For the Lord hath spoken, 

I have nourished and brought up children, 
And they have rebelled against me. 

3 The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib : 
But Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider. 

4 Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, 
A seed of evildoers, children that are degenerate : 
They have forsaken the Lord, 

They have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, 
They are gone away backward. 

5 Why should ye be stricken any more ? 
Ye will revolt more and more : 

The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. 

6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness 

in it ; 

But wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores : 
They have not been closed, neither bound up, 
Neither mollified with ointment. 

7 Your country a waste ! your cities burned with fire ! 
Your land, strangers devour it before your faces, 
And it is wasted, as the manner of foreign invaders is. 

8 And the daughter of Zion is left as a shed in a vineyard, 
As a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. 

9 Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, 
We should have 'been as Sodom ; we should have been like unto 

Gomorrah. 

10 Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom ; 
Give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. 

11 To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? 

saith the Lord: 

I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; 
And I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he 
goats. 

A A 2 



356 



ISAIAH I. 



12 When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at 

your hand, to tread my courts ? 

13 Bring no more vain oblations : incense is an abomination unto me ; 
The new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot 

away with ; 
It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. 

14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth ; 
They are become a burden unto me ; I am weary to bear it. 

15 And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from 

you : 

Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear : 
Your hands are full of blood. 

16 Wash you, make you clean ; 

Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes ; 

17 Cease to do evil ; learn to do well ; 
Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, 
Right the fatherless, plead for the widow. 

18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord : 
Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; 
Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. 

19 If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall feed on the good of the land ; 

20 But if ye refuse and rebel, the sword shall feed on you : 
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 

21 How is the faithful city become an harlot ! 

It was full of judgment ; righteousness lodged in it : but now mur- 
derers. 

22 Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water : 

23 Thy rulers are rebels, and companions of thieves : 
Every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards : 

They judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow 
come unto them. 

24 Therefore saith the Lord, 

The Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, 
Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine 
enemies : 

25 And I will turn my hand upon thee, 

And purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin ; 
25 And I will restore thy judges as at the first, 
And thy counsellors as at the beginning : 

Afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the 
faithful city. 

27 Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with right- 

eousness. 

28 And the destruction of the rebels and sinners shall be together, 
And they that forsake the Lord shall be consumed. 

29 For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired, 
And ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen. 

so For ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, 
And as a garden that hath no water. 



ISAIAH II. 



357 



31 And the strong shall become tow, and his work a spark, 

And they shall both burn together, and none shall quench them. 



II The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning 

JUDAH AND JERUSALEM. 

2 And it shall come to pass in the last days, 

That the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the 

head of the mountains, 
And shall be exalted above the hills ; 
And all nations shall flow unto it. 

3 And many peoples shall go and say, 

Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, 
To the house of the God of Jacob ; 

And he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths : 
For out of Zion shall go forth the law, 
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 

4 And he shall judge between the nations, 
And shall arbitrate for many peoples : 

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 
And their spears into pruninghooks : 
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 
Neither shall they learn war any more. 

5 O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord. 

6 Therefore thou hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob, 
Because they be replenished from the East, 

And are soothsayers like the Philistines, 

And they please themselves in the children of strangers. 

7 Their land also is full of silver and gold, 
Neither is there any end of their treasures ; 

Their land is also full of horses, neither is there any end of their 
chariots : 

8 ' Their land also is full of idols: they worship the work of their own 

hands, 

That which their own fingers have made : 

9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth 

himself : 
Therefore forgive them not. 

10 Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust, 
For fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty. 

11 The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, 

And the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, 
And the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. 

12 For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon every thing proud 

and lofty, 

And upon every thing lifted up ; and it shall be brought low : 

13 And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, 
And upon all the oaks of Bashan, 



A A. 3 



358 



ISAIAH III. 



14 And upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are 

lifted up, 

15 And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, 

16 And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all images of desire. 

17 And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, 
And the haughtiness of man shall be made low : 
And the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. 

18 And the idols he shall utterly abolish. 

19 And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves 

of the earth, 

For fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, 
When he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. 

20 In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of 

gold, 

Which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles 
and to the bats ; 

21 To go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged 

rocks, 

For fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, 
When he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. 

22 Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils : 
For wherein is he to be accounted of? 

Ill For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, 

Doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah 
The stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay 
of water, 

2 The mighty man, and the man of war, 

The judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the elder, 

3 The captain of fifty, and the honourable man, 

And the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent 
orator. 

4 And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule 

over them. 

5 And the people shall rage, man against man, and neighbour 

against neighbour : 
The child shall behave himself proudly against the elder. 
And the base against the honourable. 

6 When a man shall take hold of his brother of the house of his 
father, saying, 

Thou hast clothing, be thou our ruler, and let this ruin be under 
thy hand : 

7 In that day shall he swear, saying, I will not be an healer ; 
For in my house is neither bread nor clothing : 

Make me not a ruler of the people. 

8 For Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen : 

Because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, 
To provoke the eyes of his glory. 

9 The show of their countenance doth witness against them ; 
And they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. 

Woe unto their soul ! for they have rewarded evil unto themselves. 



ISAIAH IV. 



359 



10 Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him : 
For they shall eat the fruit of their doings. 

11 Woe unto the wicked I it shall be ill with him : 
For the reward of his hands shall be given him. 

12 As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule 

over them. 

O my people, thy leaders cause thee to err, and destroy the way 
of thy paths. 

13 The Lord riseth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people. 

14 The Lord will enter into judgment 

With the ancients of his people and the princes thereof : 
For ye have eaten up the vineyard ; 
The spoil of the poor is in your houses. 

15 What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, 
And grind the faces of the poor ? 

Saith the Lord God of hosts. 

16 Moreover the Lord saith, 

Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, 

And walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, 

Walking and mincing as they go, 

And making a tinkling with their feet : 

17 Therefore the Lord will make bald the crown of the head of the 

daughters of Zion, 
And the Lord will discover their shame. 

18 In that day the Lord will take away 
The bravery of their feet-rings, 
And the nets, and the crescents, 

19 The ear-drops, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, 

20 The bonnets, and the feet-chains, and the headbands, 

21 And the scent-boxes, and the amulets, the rings, and nose jewels, 

22 The holiday suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, 

and the purses, 

23 The mirrors, and the fine linen, and the turbans, and the veils. 

24 r And it shall come to pass, that instead of perfume, there shall be 

stench ; 

And instead of a girdle, a rent ; and instead of well curled hair, 
baldness ; 

And instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth ; 
And burning instead of beauty. 

25 Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. 

26 And her gates shall lament and mourn : 

And she, being desolate, shall sit on the ground. 
IV And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, 
We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel : 
Only let us be called by thy name ; take thou away our reproach. 

2 In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glo- 
rious, 

And the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely 
For them that are escaped of Israel. 

A A 4 



\ 



360 



ISAIAH V. 



3 And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, 
And he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, 
Even every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem : 

4 When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters 

of Zion, 

And shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst 
thereof 

By the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning. 

5 And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of mount 

Zion, 

And upon her assemblies, 

A cloud and smoke by day, 

And the shining of a flaming fire by night : 

For upon all the glory shall be a defence. 

6 And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from 

the heat, 

And for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from 
rain. 



V Now will I sing to my Beloved, 

A song of my Beloved touching his vineyard. 

My Beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill : 

2 And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, 
And planted it with the choicest vine, 

And built a tower in the midst of it, and also hewed out a wine- 
fat therein : 

And he looked that it should bring forth grapes, 
And it brought forth wild grapes. 

3 And now, O inhabitant of Jerusalem, and man of Judah, 
Judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. 

4 What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not 

done in it ? 

Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought 
it forth wild grapes ? 

5 And now go to ; I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard : 
I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up ; 
And break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down : 

6 And I will lay it waste : it shall not be pruned, nor digged ; 
But there shall come up briers and thorns : 

I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 

7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, 
And the men of Judah his pleasant plant: 

And he looked for judgment, but behold oppression ; 
For righteousness, but behold a cry. 

. 8 Woe unto them that join house to house, 

That lay field to field, till there be no place, 
And ye are left to dwell alone in the midst of the earth ! 
9 In mine ears saith the Lord of hosts, 



ISAIAH V. 



361 



Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, 
Even great and fair, without inhabitant. 

10 Yea, ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, 
And an homer of seed shall yield an ephah. 

11 Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, 
That they may follow strong drink : 

That continue until night, till wine inflame them ! 

12 And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in 

their feasts : 
But they regard not the work of the Lord, 
Neither consider the operation of his hands. 

13 Therefore my people are gone into captivity, 
Because they have no knowledge : 

And their honourable men are famished, 
And their multitude dried up with thirst. 

14 Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth with-' 

out measure : 

And down go their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp,, 
And he that rejoiceth in it. 

15 And the mean man shall be brought down, 
And the mighty man shall be humbled, 
And the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled : 

16 But the Lord of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, 
And God that is holy shall be sanctified in righteousness. 

17 Then shall the lambs feed after their manner, 

And the waste places of the fat ones shall strangers eat. 

18 Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, 
And sin as it were with a cart rope : 

19 That say, Let him make speed, 

And hasten his work, that we may see it : 
And let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh, 
And come, that we may know it ! 
iO Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil ; 
That put darkness for light, and light for darkness ; 
That put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter ! 

21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, 
And prudent in their own sight ! 

22 Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, 
And men of strength to mingle strong drink : 

23 Which justify the wicked for reward, 

And take away the righteousness of the righteous from him ! 

24 Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, 
And the flame consumeth the chaff, 

So their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up 
as dust : 

Because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, 
And despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. 

25 Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people, 



362 



ISAIAH VI. 



And he hath stretched forth his hand against them, 
And hath smitten them : and the hills did tremble, 
And their carcases were as the sweepings in the midst of the streets. 
For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched 
out still. 

26 And he hath lifted up an ensign to the nations from far, 
And hath hissed unto them from the end of the earth : 
And, behold they will come right speedily : 

27 None hath fainted nor stumbled among them; 
None shall slumber nor sleep ; 

Neither is the girdle of their loins loosed, 
Nor the latchet of their shoes broken : 

28 Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, 
Their horses' hoofs are counted like flint, 

And their wheels like a whirlwind : 

29 Their roaring is like that of a lioness, 
They shall roar like young lions : 

Yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, 
And shall carry it away safe, and none shall deliver it. 
so And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the 
sea : 

And if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, 
And the light is darkened in the heavens thereof. 



VI In the year that king Uzziah died, 
I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, 
High and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. 

2 About him stood the seraphim : each one had six wings ; 

With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his 
feet, and with twain he did fly. 

3 And one cried unto another, and said, 

Holy ! holy ! holy ! is the Lord of hosts : 
The whole earth is full of his glory. 

4 And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, 
And the house was filled with smoke. 

5 Then said I, Woe is me ! for I am undone ; 

Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 

people of unclean lips : 
For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. 

6 Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his 

hand, 

Which he had taken with the tongs from off" the altar : 

7 And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, 
Lo, this hath touched thy lips ; 

And thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. 

8 Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 
Whom shall I send, and who will go for us ? 
Then said I, Here am I ; send me. 



ISAIAH VII. 



363 



9 And he said, Go, and tell this people, 
Hear ye indeed, but understand not ; 
And see ye indeed, but perceive not. 

10 Make the heart of this people fat, 

And make their ears heavj^, and shut their eyes ; 

Lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, 

And understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. 

11 Then said I, Lord, how long? 
And he answered, 

Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses with- 
out man, 
And the land be utterly desolate, 

12 And the Lord have removed men far away, 

And there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land. 

13 And though a tenth part shall remain in it, even that shall be again 

consumed : 

Yet as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when 

they cast their leaves : 
So the holy seed shall be the substance thereof. 



VII And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the 
son of Uzziah, king of Judah, 
That Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king 
of Israel, 

Went up toward Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail 
against it. 

2 And it was told in the house of David, saying, 
Syria is confederate with Ephraim : 

And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, 
As the trees of the wood are moved with the wind. 
Then said the Lord unto Isaiah, 

3 Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, 
At the end of the aqueduct of the upper pool, 

In the highway of the fuller's field ; 

4 And say unto him, 

Take heed, and be quiet ; fear not, neither be fainthearted, 
For these two tails of smoking firebrands, 

For the fierce anger of Rezin with Syria, and of the son of Remalkh. 

5 Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, 
Have taken evil counsel against thee, saying, 

6 Let us go up against Judah, and vex it, 
And let us make a breach therein for us, 

And set a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeal : 

7 Thus saith the Lord God, 

It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. 

8 For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is 

Rezin ; 

And within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broker^ 
that it be not a people. 



364 



ISAIAH VIII. 



9 And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is 
Remaliah's son. 
If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established. 

10 Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, 

11 Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God ; 

Ask it either in the depth or in the height above. 

12 But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. 

13 And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David ; 
Is it a small thing for you to weary men, 

But will ye weary my God also ? 

14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign ; 
See ! a virgin, with child, and bearing a son, 
And she calls his name Immanuel. 

15 Butter and honey shall he eat, till he knows to refuse the evil, and 

choose the good. 

16 For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the 

good, 

The land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. 

17 The Lord shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and 
upon thy father's house, 

Days that have not come, from the day that Ephraim departed 

from Judah ; 
Even the king of Assyria. 
3 8 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part 

of the rivers of Egypt, 
And for the bee that is in the land of Assyria 

19 And they shall come, and shall rest all of them 

In the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, 
And upon all hedges, and upon all bushes. 

20 In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired, 
Namely, by them beyond the River, by the king of Assyria, 
The head, and the hair of the feet : and it shall also consume the 

beard, 

21 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That a man shall nourish a young cow, and two sheep ; 

22 And it shall come to pass, 

For the abundance of milk that they shall give he shall eat butter : 
For butter and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land. 

23 And it shall come to pass in that day, that every place, 
Where there were a thousand vines at a thousand silverlings, 
Shall be for briers and thorns. 

24 With arrows and with bows shall men come thither ; 
Because all the land shall become briers and thorns. 

25 And on all hills that were digged with the hoe, 

Thou shalt not go thither for fear of briers and thorns : 
But it shall be for the sending forth of oxen, 
And for the treading of sheep. 

VIII Moreover the Lord said unto me, 

Take thee a great roll, and write in it, with a man's pen, 



ISAIAH VIII. 



365 



" To Haste-plunder — Speed-spoil." 

2 And I took unto me faithful witnesses to record, 
Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah. 

3 And I went unto the prophetess ; and she conceived, and bare a 

son. 

Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz. 

4 For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and 

my mother, 

The riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken 
away — before the king of Assyria. 

5 The Lord spake also unto me again, saying, 

6 Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go 

softly, 

And rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah's son ; 

7 Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them 
The waters of the River, strong and many, 

Even the king of Assyria, and all his glory : 

And he shall come up over all his channels, and go over all his 
banks : 

8 And he shall pass over into Judah ; he shall overflow and go over, 
He shall reach to the neck ; 

And the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy 
land, O Immanuel. 

9 Associate yourselves, O ye people, 
And ye shall be broken in pieces ; 
And give ear, all ye of far countries : 

Gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces ; 
Gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces ; 

10 Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought ; 
Speak the word, and it shall not stand : for God is with us. 

11 For the Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand, 

And instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, 
Saying, — 

12 Say ye not, A confederacy, 

To all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy ; 
Neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid. 

13 Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself ; 

And let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. 

14 And he shall be for a sanctuary; 

But for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence 
To both the houses of Israel, 

For a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 

1 5 And many among them shall stumble, 

And fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken. 

16 Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples. 

17 And I will wait upon the Lord, that hideth his face from the 

house of Jacob, 
And I will look for him. 



366 



ISAIAH IX. 



18 Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me 
Are for signs and for wonders in Israel 

From the Lord of hosts, which dwelleth in mount Zion. 

19 And when they shall say unto you, 
Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, 
And unto wizards that peep, and that mutter : 
Should not a people seek unto their God ? 
Should the living seek to the dead ? 

20 To the law and to the testimony : 

If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no 
light in them. 

21 And they shall pass through the land hardly bestead and hungry : 
And it shall come to pass, 

That when they are hungry, they shall fret themselves, 
And shall curse their king and their God ; 

22 And they shall look upward, and they shall look unto the earth ; 
And behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish ; 

And they shall be driven into the darkness. 

IX Yet. her dimness and anguish shall not be for ever : 

As the former time hath brought low the land of Zebulun and the 

land of Napthali, 
So the latter time shall make her glorious, 
By the way of the sea, along Jordan, Galilee of the nations. 

2 The people that walked in darkness, have seen a great light : 
They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, 

Upon them hath the light sliined. 

3 Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased their joy: 
They joy before thee as with the joy in harvest, 

As men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 

4 For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff laid on 

his shoulder, 

The rod of his task-master, as in the day of Midian. 

5 For every warrior's greaves with their clang in battle, and his 

garments rolled in blood, 
Shall be for burning and food for fire. 

6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given : 
And the government shall be upon his shoulder : 

And his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, 

The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. 

7 Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, 
Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom ; 

To order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice, 

From henceforth even for ever. 

The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this. 

8 The Lord sent a word into Jacob, and it hath lighted upon 
Israel. 

9 And all the people shall know, even Ephraim and the inhabitant 

of Samaria, 
That say in the pride and stoutness of heart, 
10 The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: 



ISAIAH X. 



367 



The sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars. 

11 And the Lord shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against him, 
And join his enemies together ; 

1 2 The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind ; 
And they shall devour Israel with open mouth. 
For all this his anger is not turned away, 

But his hand is stretched out still. 

13 For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them, 
Neither do they seek the Lord of hosts. 

14 Therefore the Lord will cut off from Israel head and tail, palm tree 

and rush, in one day. 

15 The ancient and honourable, he is the head ; 
And the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail. 

16 For the leaders of this people cause them to err ; 
And they that are led of them are destroyed. 

17 Therefore the Lord shall have no joy in their young men, 
Neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows : 
For every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, 

And every mouth speaketh folly. 

For all this his anger is not turned away, 

But his hand is stretched out still. 

18 For wickedness burnetii as the fire : 
It shall devour the briers and thorns, 

And shall kindle in the thickets of the forest, 
And they shall go up in volumes of smoke. 

19 Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, 
And the people shall be as the fuel of the fire : 

No man shall spare his brother. 

20 And he shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry ; 

And he shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied : 
They shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm : 

21 Manasseh, Ephraim ; and Ephraim, Manasseh : 
And they together shall be against Judah. 
For all this his anger is not turned away, 

But his hand is stretched out still. 

X Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, 
And to the scribes that prescribe oppression ; 

2 To turn aside the needy from judgment, 

And to take away the right from the poor of my people, 
That widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the father- 
less I 

3 And what will ye do in the day of visitation, 
And in the desolation which shall come from far ? 

To whom will ye flee for help ? and where will ye leave your 
glory ? 

4 Without me, they shall bow down among the prisoners, and they 

shall fall under the slain. 
For all this his anger is not turned away, 
But his hand is stretched out still. 



368 



ISAIAH X. 



5 Woe to the Assyrian ! the rod of mine anger, 
And the staff in their hand is mine indignation. 

6 I will send him against an hypocritical nation, 

And against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, 

To take the spoil, and to take the prey, 

And to tread them down like the mire of the streets. 

7 Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so ; 
But it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few. 

8 For he saith, Are not my princes altogether kings ? 

9 Is not Calno as Carchemish ? Is not Hamath as Arpad ? 
Is not Samaria as Damascus ? 

10 As my hand hath found the kingdoms of the idols, 

And whose graven images did excel them of Jerusalem and of 
Samaria ; 

11 Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to 

Jerusalem and her idols ? 

12 Wherefore it shall come to pass, 

That when the Lord hath performed his whole work 
Upon mount Zion and on Jerusalem, 

I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of Assyria, 
And the glory of his high looks. 

13 For he saith, By the strength of my hand I have done it, 
And by my wisdom ; for I am prudent: 

And I have removed the bounds of the nations, 
And have robbed their treasures, 

And I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man : 

14 And my hand hath found as a nest the riches of the nations : 
And as one gathereth eggs that are left, have I gathered all the earth ; 
And there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, 

or peeped. 

15 Shall the ax boast itself against him that heweth therewith ? 
Or shall the saw magnify itself against him that handleth it ? 

As if the rod should wield him that lifteth it, 
Or as if the staff should lift up the man. 

16 Therefore shall the Lord, the Lord of hosts, send among his fat 

ones leanness ; 
And under his glory he shall kindle a burning, 
Like the burning of a fire. 

17 And the light of Israel shall be for a fire, 
And his Holy One for a flame : 

And it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in one day ; 

18 And shall consume the glory of his forest, and of his fruitful field, 

both soul and body : 
And they shall be as when a sick man fainteth. 

19 And the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, 
That a child may write them down. 

20 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That the remnant of Israel/and such as are escaped of the house 
of Jacob, 

Shall no more again stay upon him that smote them ; 



ISAIAH XI. 



369 



But shall stay upon the Lord, the Holy one of Israel, in truth. 

21 The remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the 

mighty God. 

22 For though thy people, O Israel, be as the sand of the sea, 
Only a remnant of them shall return : 

The consumption is decreed, and full justice shall be poured out. 

23 For the Lord God of hosts is making a consumption, even as he 

hath determined, 
In the midst of all the land. 

24 Therefore thus saith the Lord God of hosts, 

O my people that dwellest in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrian 
He shall smite thee with a rod, 

And shall lift up his staff against thee, after the manner of Egypt ; 

25 But yet a very little while, and the indignation shall have ceased, 
And mine anger shall have destroyed them. 

26 And the Lord of hosts shall raise up a scourge for him, 
As in the slaughter of Midian at the rock of Oreb : 

And his rod shall be again upon the sea, and he shall lift it up 
after the manner of Egypt. 

27 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder, 
And his yoke from off thy neck, 

And the yoke shall be destroyed from off the anointed one. 

28 He is come to Aiath, he is passed through Migron ; 
At Michmash he hath laid up his baggage : 

29 They have passed the Pass : they have taken up their night-quarters 

at Geba ; 

Ramah is afraid ; Gibeah of Saul is fled. 

30 Lift up thy voice, O daughter of Gallim : 
Hear O Laish, answer her Anathoth. 

31 Madmenah has gone away ; the inhabitants of Gebim gather them- 

selves to flee. 

32 He yet halts at Nob a day : 

He shakes his hand against the mount of the daughter of Zion, the 
hill of Jerusalem. 

33 Behold the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth lop the bough 
with terror : 

And the high ones of stature are hewn down, and the haughty 
humbled. 

34 And he shall cut down the thickets of the forest with iron, 
And Lebanon shall fall by a mighty hand. 

XI And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stem of Jesse, 
And a branch shall grow out of his roots : 

2 And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, 
The spirit of wisdom and understanding, 

The spirit of counsel and might, 

The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord : 

3 And he shall be of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord : 
And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, 



B B 



370 



ISAIAH XI. 



Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears : 

4 But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, 
And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth : 
And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, 
And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. 

5 And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, 
And faithfulness the girdle of his reins. 

And the wolf shall make his home with the lamb, 

And the leopard shall lie down with the kid : 

And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together ; 

And a little child shall lead them. 
7 And the cow and the she bear shall feed together ; 

Together shall their young ones lie down : 

And the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 
9 And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, 

And the weaned'child shall put his hand on the den of the crested 
adder. 

9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : 
For the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord, 
As the waters cover the sea. 

10 And in that day shall the root of Jesse stand for an ensign 
to the peoples ; 

To it shall the nations seek : and his dwelling-place shall be glorious. 

11 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That the Lord shall set his hand again the second time 
To recover the remnant of his people which shall be left, 
From Assyria, and from Egypt, 
And from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, 
And from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the 
sea. 

12 And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, 
And shall assemble the outcast sons of Israel, 

And gather together the dispersed daughters of Judah, 
From the four corners of the earth. 

13 The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, 

And the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off: 

Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim. 

14 But they shall sweep down upon the shoulders of the Philistines 

towards the sea ; 
They shall spoil the children of the east together : 
They shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab, 
And the children of Ammon shall obey them. 

15 And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea ; 
And with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the River, 
And shall smite it into seven streams, 

And make men go over dryshod. 

16 And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people, which 

shall be left, from Assyria ; 
Like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land 
of Egypt. 



ISAIAH XII. XIII. 



371 



XII Andin that day thou shalt say, O Lord, I will praise thee ; 
Though thou wast angry with me, thine anger is turned away, 
And thou comfortest me. 

2 Behold, God is my salvation ; I will trust and not be afraid : 
For the Lord JEHOVAH is my strength and my song ; 
He also is become my salvation. 

3 Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. 

4 And in that day shall ye say, 
Praise the Lord, call upon his name, 
Declare his doings among the nations, 
Make mention that his name is exalted. 

5 Sing unto the Lord ; for he hath done excellent things : 
This is known in all the earth. 

6 Cry out and shout, thou inhabitress of Zion : 

For great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee. 



XIII The burden of Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz 
did see. 

2 Lift ye up a banner upon the bare mountain ! 
Exalt the voice unto them, shake the hand, 
That they may go into the gates of the nobles I 

3 I have commanded my consecrated ones, 

I have also called my mighty ones for mine anger, 
My warriors that rejoiced in their pride. 

4 The noise of a multitude in the mountains, like as of a great 
people ; 

The noise of a tumult of kingdoms of nations gathered together ! 
The Lord of hosts mustering the host of battle ! 

5 They come from a far country, from the end of heaven, 
The Lord and the weapons of his indignation, 

To destroy the whole land. 

6 Howl ye ; for the day of the Lord is at hand ; 
It shall come as a mighty stroke from the Almighty. 

7 Therefore shall all hands fall down, and every man's heart shall 

melt : 

8 And thev shall be afraid : pangs and sorrows shall take hold of 

them : 

They shall writhe with pain as a woman that travaileth ; 
They shall stand aghast, every man at his neighbour, 
Their faces shall be as flames. 

9 Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, 

Cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate : 
And he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. 
10 For the stars of heaven, and the constellations thereof, shall not give 
their light : 
The sun is darkened in his going forth, 
And the moon shall not cause her light to shine. 



B B 2 



372 



ISAIAH XIV. 



11 And I will visit upon the world its evil, and upon the wicked their 

iniquity ; 

And I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, 
And will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. 

12 I will make a man more precious than fine gold ; 
Even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. 

13 Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out 

of her place, 

In the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce 
anger. 

14 And it shall be that as the chased roe, and as sheep with none to 

gather them, 
They shall every man turn to his own people, 
And flee every one into his own land. 

15 Every one that is overtaken shall be thrust through; 
And all that are rallied together shall fall by the sword. 

16 And their children shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes ; 
Their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. 

17 Behold I am stirring up the Medes against them, 

Which shall not regard silver, and as for gold, they shall not delight 
in it. 

18 Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces ; 
And they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb ; 
Their eye shall not spare children. 

19 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees* 

excellency, 

Shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. 

20 Tt shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from 

generation to generation : 
Neither shall the Arab pitch tent there ; 
Neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. 

21 But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there ; 
And their houses shall be full of yellings ; 

And the daughters of the ostrich shall dwell there, 
And wild goats shall dance there ; 

22 And wolves shall howl in their palaces, 
And jackals in their pleasure houses : 

And her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged. 

XIV For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, 
And will yet choose Israel, 
And cause them to rest in their own land : 

And the strangers shall be joined with them, and shall cleave to 
the house of Jacob. 

2 And the nations shall take them, and bring them to their place : 
And the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord 

for servants and handmaids : 
And they shall take them captives, whose captives they were ; 
And they shall rule over their oppressors. 

3 And it shall come to pass, 



ISAIAH XIV. 



373 



In the day that the Lord shall give thee rest 
From thy sorrow, and from thy fear, 

And from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve, 

4 That thou shalt raise this song over the king of Babylon, and say, 
How hath the oppressor ceased ! the golden city ceased ! 

5 The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, the sceptre of the 

rulers ; 

6 Which struck the peoples in wrath with a continual stroke, 
Which ruled the nations in anger, with a persecution that none 

hindered. 

7 The whole earth is at rest, is quiet : they break forth into singing. 

8 Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, 
Now that thou art laid down, no feller shall come up against us. 

9 Hell from beneath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy coming : 
It stirreth up the giant-shades for thee, all the chief ones of the 

earth ; 

It hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. 

10 All they shall speak and say unto thee, 

Art thou also become weak as we ? art thou become like unto us ? 

11 Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols : 
The worm is spread under thee, and the earth-worms cover thee. 

12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning I 
How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the 

nations ! 

13 For thou hast said in thine heart, 

I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars 
of God : 

I will sit also upon the mount of assembly, in the uttermost north : 

14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds ; I will be like the 

Most High. 

15 But thou shalt be only brought down to hell, to the uttermost pit. 

16 They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider 

thee, saying, 

Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake 
kingdoms ; 

17 That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities 

thereof ; 

That loosed not his prisoners homewards ? 

18 All the kings of the nations, all of them, lie in state, every one in 

his own house : 

19 But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, 
And as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a 

sword, 

That go down to the stones of the pit ; as a carcase trodden under 
feet. 

20 Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, 

Because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people : 
The seed of evil doers shall be named no more for ever. 

21 Prepare slaughter for his children, for the iniquity of their fathers ; 



B B 3 



374 



ISAIAH XV. 



That they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the 
world with cities. 

22 For I will rise up against them, saith the Lord of hosts, 
And cut off from Babylon the name, and remnant, 

And the son, and the son's son, saith the Lord. 

23 I will also make it a possession for the porcupine, and pools of 

water : 

And I will sweep it with the besom of destruction : 
The Lord of hosts hath said it. 

24 The Lord of hosts hath sworn, saying, 

Surely as I have thought, so hath it come to pass ; 
And as I have purposed, so shall it stand : 

25 To break the Assyrian in my land, and upon my mountains I will 

tread him under foot : 
Then shall his yoke depart from off them, and his burden depart 
from off their shoulders. 

26 This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth : 
And this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations. 

27 For the Lord of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it ? 
And it is his hand that is stretched out, and who shall turn it back ? 



28 In the year that king Ahaz died was this burden. 

29 Rejoice not thou, whole Philistia, 

Because the rod of him that smote thee is broken : 

For out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, 

And his fruit shall be a fiery dragon. 

30 And the firstborn of the poor shall feed, and the needy shall lie 

down in safety : 

And I will kill thy root with famine, and he shall slay thy remnant. 

31 Howl, O gate ; Cry, O city ; thou, whole Philistia, art dissolved : 
For there cometh from the north a smoke, 

And there is no straggler in his hosts. 

32 What shall one then answer the messengers of the nations ? 
That the Lord hath founded Zion, 

And the poor of his people shall take refuge in it. 



XV The burden of Moab. 

Verily in the night Ar-Moab is laid waste, is brought to silence! 
Verily in the night Kir-Moab is laid waste, is brought to silence! 

2 He is gone up to Bajith, and to Dibon, the high places, to weep ; 
Moab doth howl over Nebo, and over Medeba : 

On all their heads baldness, and every beard cut off! 

3 In their streets they gird themselves with sackcloth : 
On the tops of their houses, and in their squares, 
Every one doth howl, weeping abundantly. 



ISAIAH XVI. 



375 



4 And Heshbon doth cry, and Elealeh : their voice is heard even unto 

Jahaz : 

Therefore the armed soldiers of Moab cry out ; 
His life is grievous unto him. 

5 My heart crieth out for Moab ; 

His fugitives flee unto Zoar, like an heifer of three years old: 
For by the ascent of Luhith they go up with weeping ; 
For in the way of Horonaim they raise a broken cry. 

6 For the waters of Ninirim are desolate : 

For the grass is withered, the young herbage faileth, there is no 
green thing. 

7 Therefore the abundance they have gotten, and that which they 

have laid up, 
Do they carry away over the brook of the willows. 

8 For the cry is gone round about the borders of Moab ; 

The howling thereof unto Eglaim, and the howling thereof unto 
Beer-elim. 

9 For the waters of Dimon shall be full of blood : for I will bring 

more upon Dimon, 
Lions upon him that escapeth of Moab, and upon the remnant of 
the land. 

XVI Send ye the lamb to the ruler of the land, 
From Selah through the wilderness, 
Unto the mount of the daughter of Zion. 

2 For it shall be, that, as a wandering bird cast out of the nest, 
So the daughters of Moab shall be at the fords of Arnon. 

3 Take counsel, execute judgment; 

Make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday ; 
Hide the outcasts ; betray not the fugitive. 

4 Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab ; 

Be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler : 
For the extortioner is at an end, the spoiler ceaseth, 
The oppressors are consumed out of the land. 

5 And in mercy shall the throne be established : 

And one shall sit upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David, 
Judging, and seeking justice, and hasting righteousness. 

6 We have heard the pride of Moab, the very proud ; 

His haughtiness, and his pride, and his wrath, — his lying boasts. 

7 Therefore shall Moab howl for Moab, all of it shall howl : 
For the foundations of Kir-hareseth shall ye mourn ; 
Surely they are stricken. 

8 For the fields of Heshbon languish, and the vine of Sibmah : 
The lords of the nations break down the principal plants thereof, 
They reached unto Jazer, they strayed into the wilderness : 

Her branches were stretched out, they went over the sea. 

9 Therefore I will bewail with the weeping of Jazer the vine of 

Sibmah : 

I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon, and Elealeh : 

For the battle-shout is fallen on thy summer fruits and thy harvest. 



B B 4 



376 



ISAIAH XVII. 



10 And gladness is taken away, and joy from the plentiful field ; 
And in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there 

be shouting : 

The treaders shall tread out no wine in their presses ; 
I have made their vintage shouting to cease. 

11 Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, 
And mine inward parts for Kir-haresh. 

12 And it shall come to pass, when it is seen that Moab is weary on 

the high place, 
That he shall come to his sanctuary to pray ; 
But he shall not prevail. 

13 This is the word that the Lord spake concerning Moab of old. 

14 But now the Lord hath spoken, saying, 
Within three years, as the years of an hireling, 
And the glory of Moab shall be put to shame, 
With all that great multitude; 

And the remnant shall be very small and feeble. 



XVII The burden of Damascus. 

Behold Damascus is taken away from being a city, 
And it shall be a ruinous heap. 

2 The cities of Aroer are forsaken : 

They shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall 
make them afraid. 

3 The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, 

And the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria : 
They shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, 
Saith the Lord of hosts. 

4 And in that day it shall come to pass, 
That the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, 
And the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean. 

5 And it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn, 
And reapeth the ears with his arm ; 

And it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the valley of Rephaim. 

6 Yet gleanings shall be left in it, as the shaking of an olive tree ; 
Two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, 

Four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, 
Saith the Lord God of Israel. 

7 At that day shall a man look to his Maker, 

And his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel. 

8 And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands, 
Neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, 
Either the images of Astarte, or the pillars of the Sun. 

9 In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, 
And an uppermost branch, 

Which they leave because of the children of Israel : 
And there shall be desolation. 
io Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, 



ISAIAH XVIII. 



377 



And hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, 
Therefore thou mayest plant pleasant plants, 
And mayest set slips from a foreign soil ; 

11 In the day mayest thou make thy plant to grow, 

And in the morning mayest thou make thy seed to flourish ; 
But away flies the crop in the day of harvest, 
And thou shalt have hopeless sorrow. 

12 O the noise of many peoples, they make a noise like the noise 
of the seas ; 

And the rush of nations, they rush like the rushing of mighty 
waters ! 

13 The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters; 
But He shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, 

And shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, 
And like a rolling thing before the whirlwind. 

14 And behold at eveningtide trouble ; 
And before the morning he is not. 
This is the portion of them that spoil us, 
And the lot of them that rob us. 

XVIII O land rustling with wings, which borders on the rivers of 
Ethiopia : 

2 That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in bulrush boats upon 

the waters, 

Saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation outspread and fierce, 
To a people terrible from their beginning hitherto ; 
A nation that meteth out and treadeth down, whose land the 
rivers divide I 

3 All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, 
Shall see as it were the lifting up of an ensign on the mountains ; 
And shall hear as it were the blowing of a trumpet. 

4 For so the Lord said unto me, I will take my rest, 
And I will look on in my dwelling-place, 

Like a clear heat upon herbage, and like a cloud of dew in the 
heat of harvest. 

5 For afore the harvest, when the bloom is finished, 
And the flower becomes a ripening grape, 

He shall cut off the sprigs with pruning hooks, 
And take away and cut down the branches. 

6 They shall be left together unto the fowls of the mountains, and 

to the beasts of the earth : 
And the fowls shall summer upon them, and all the beasts of the 
earth shall winter upon them. 

7 In that time shall the present be brought unto the Lord of hosts, 
Of a people outspread and fierce, 

And from a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; 
A nation that meteth out and treadeth under foot ; 
Whose land the rivers divide ; 

To the place of the name of the Lord of hosts, the mount Zion. 



378 



ISAIAH XIX. 



XIX The burden of Egypt. 

Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, 
And cometh into Egypt : 

And the idols of Egypt are moved at his presence, j \ 
And the heart of Egypt doth melt within him. 

2 And I will set Egypt against Egypt : 

And they shall fight every one against his brother, 

And every one against his neighbour; 

City against city, and kingdom against kingdom. 

3 And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof ; 
And I will destroy the counsel thereof : 

And they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, 
And to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards. 

4 And the Egyptians will I shut up in the hand of a hard lord ; 
And a stern king shall rule over them ; 

Saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts. 

5 And the waters shall fail from the sea, 
And the river shall be wasted and dried up. 

6 And the rivers shall become putrid : 

And the canals of Egypt shall be emptied and dried up : 
The reeds and flags shall wither. 

7 The meadows by the River, by the border of the River, 

And every thing sown by the River, shall wither, be driven away, 
and be no more. 

8 The fishers also shall mourn, 

And all they that cast angle into the River shall lament, 
And they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. 

9 And the workers in combed flax, and the weavers of white linen, 

shall be confounded. 

10 And the pillars of the land are broken down, 
And all her labouring men are grieved in heart. 

11 The princes of Zoan are utterly foolish, 

The counsel of the wise counsellors of Pharaoh is become brutish : 
How say ye unto Pharaoh, 

I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings ? 

12 Where are they ? where are thy wise men ? 
And let them tell thee now, and let them know 
What the Lord of hosts hath purposed upon Egypt. 

13 The princes of Zoan are become fools, 
The princes of Noph are deceived ; 

They have also misled Egypt, they that are the heads of her tribes. 

14 The Lord hath mingled a spirit of reeling in the midst of them : 
And they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, 

As a drunken man staggereth in his vomit. 

15 Neither shall there be any work for Egypt, 
Which the head or tail, branch or rush, may do. 

16 In that day shall Egypt be like unto women : 
And it shall be afraid, and fear, 

From before the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts, 
Which he shaketh over it. 



ISAIAH XX. 



379 



17 And the land of Judah shall be a terror unto Egypt, 

Every one that maketh mention thereof shall be afraid in himself, 
Because of the counsel of the Lord of hosts, 
Which he hath determined against it. 

18 In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the 

language of Canaan, 
And swear to the Lord of hosts ; 
One shall be called, The city of destruction. 

19 In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord 
In the midst of the land of Egypt, 

And a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord. 

20 And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts 

in the land of Egypt : 
For they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, 
And he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, 
And he shall deliver them. 

21 And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, 

And the Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day, 

And shall do sacrifice and oblation ; 

And shall vow vows unto the Lord, and perform them. 

22 And the Lord shall smite Egypt : he shall smite and heal it: 
And they shall return to the Lord, 

And he shall be entreated of them, and shall heal them. 

23 In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, 
And the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, 

And the Egyptian into Assyria, 

And Egypt shall serve the Lord with Assyria. 

24 In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with 

Assyria, 

25 A blessing in the midst of the earth : 

Whom the Lord of hosts hath blessed, saying, 

Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, 

And Israel mine inheritance. 



XX In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, 
When Sargon the king of Assyria sent him, 
And fought against Ashdod, and took it; 

2 At the same time spake the Lord by Isaiah the son of Amoz, 
Saying, Go, and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, 

And put off thy shoe from thy foot. 

And he did so, walking naked and barefoot. 

3 And the Lord said, 

Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot, 

A three years sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia ; 

4 So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners, 

and the Ethiopians captives, 
Young and old, naked and barefoot, 



380 



ISAIAH XXI. 



Even with their hind-parts uncovered, to the shame of Egypt. 

5 And they shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia their expectation, 

and of Egypt their glory. 

6 And the inhabitants of this coast shall say in that day, 
Behold, such is our expectation, whither we fled for help, 
To be delivered from the king of Assyria : 

And how shall we escape ? 



XXI The burden of the Desert of the Sea. 

As whirlwinds in the south sweep along ; 

So it cometh from the desert, from a terrible land! 

2 A grievous vision is declared unto me ; 

The treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler 
spoileth. 

Go up, O Elam : besiege, O Media : 

All the sighing thereof have I made to cease. 

3 Therefore are my loins filled with pain : 

Pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that 
travaileth : 

T writhe so that I cannot hear ; I shudder so that I cannot see. 

4 My heart panteth, fearfulness affrighteth me : 

The night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me. 

5 Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink : 
Arise, ye princes, anoint the shield I 

6 For thus hath the Lord said unto me, 

Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. 

7 And he saw cavalry, horsemen two and two, 
Riders on asses, riders on camels; 

8 And he hearkened diligently with much heed : and he cried, A lion ! 
O Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, 
And I am set in my ward whole nights : 

9 And, behold, here come mounted men, horsemen two and two. 
And he spake again, and said, 

Babylon is fallen, is fallen ; 

And all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the 
ground. 

10 O my threshing, and the corn of my floor : 

That which I have heard of the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, 
The B r nave I declared unto you. 
den of O ne calleth to me out of Seir, 

Dumah. Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? 
12 The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night : 
If ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come again. 

den upon ^ n ^ ne thickets in Arabia shall ye lodge, 

Arabia. O ye travelling companies of Dedanim. 

14 The inhabitants of the land of Tema bring water to him that is 
thirsty, 

They come to meet the fugitive with bread. 



ISAIAH XXII. 



381 



15 For they flee from the face of the swords, from the drawn sword, 
And from the bent bow, and from the grievousness of war. 

16 For thus saith the Lord unto me, 

Within a year, according to the years of an hireling, 
And all the glory of Kedar shall fail : 

17 And the residue of the number of archers, 

The mighty men of the children of Kedar, shall become few : 
For the Lord God of Israel hath spoken it. 



XXII The burden of the Valley of Vision. 

What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the 
housetops, 

2 Thou City full of stirs, a tumultuous, joyous city? 

Thy slain men are not slain with the sword, nor dead in battle. 

3 All thy princes are fled together, they are bound by the archers : 
All that are found in thee are bound together, which have fled afar. 

4 Therefore say I, Look away from me ; 

I will weep bitterly, labour not to comfort me, 
Because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people. 

5 For there is a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of per- 

plexity, 

From the Lord God of hosts, in the valley of vision, 

Of breaking down the walls, and of crying to the mountains. 

6 And Elatn bears the quiver, with chariots, infantry, and horsemen, 
And Kir uncovereth the shield. 

7 And it hath come to pass, that thy choicest valleys are full of 

chariots, 

And the horsemen have set themselves in array at the gate, 
i 8 And the veil of Judah is torn away. 

And thou hast looked in this day to the armour of the house of 
the forest : 

9 And ye have seen to the breaches of the city of David, that they 
are many : 

And ye have gathered together the waters of the lower pool : 

10 And ye have numbered the houses of Jerusalem, 

And the houses have ye broken down to repair the wall. 

11 And ye have made a reservoir between the Two Walls, 
For the water of the old pool : 

But ye have not looked unto Him who hath done this, 
Neither seen Him who purposed it long ago. 

12 And in this day doth the Lord God of hosts call to weeping, and 

to mourning, 
And to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth : 

13 And behold mirth and jollity, 

Slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine : 
Let us eat and drink ; for to-morrow we shall die. 

14 And the Lord of hosts hath revealed himself in mine ears, 



382 



ISAIAH XXIII. 



Surely this iniquity shall not be expiated by you till ye die, 
Saith the Lord God of hosts. 

15 Thus saith the Lord God of hosts, 
Go, get thee unto this treasurer, 

Unto Shebna, which is over the house, and say, 

16 What hast thou here? and whom hast thou here? 
That thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre here, — 
Hewing him out a sepulchre on high ! 

Graving an habitation for himself in a rock ! 

17 Behold the Lord will quickly cast thee down, O man, 

18 Seizing thee, and rolling thee together like a ball, 

And violently tossing thee like a ball into a wide country; 
There shalt thou die, and there shall go the chariots of thy glory. 
Thou shame of thy lord's house. 

19 And I will drive thee from thy station, 

And from thy state thou shalt be pulled down. 

20 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah : 

21 And I will clothe him with thy robe, 
And strengthen him with thy girdle, 

And I will commit thy government into his hand : 
And he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to 
the house of Judah. 

22 And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder ; 
And he shall open, and none shall shut ; 

And he shall shut, and none shall open. 

23 And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place ; 

And he shall be for a glorious support to his father's house. 

24 And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father's house, 

the offspring and the issue, 
Every small vessel, from cups to flagons of every kind. 

25 In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, 

Shall the nail fastened in the sure place be removed, 
And be cut down, and fall ; 

And the burden that was upon it shall be cut off : 
For the Lord hath spoken it. 



XXIII The burden of Ttre. 

Howl, ye ships of Tarshish ; for it is laid waste! 
There is no house, no entering in : 
From the land of Chittim it is made known to them. 

2 Be silent, ye inhabitants of the Isle ; 

Thou whom the merchants of Sidon have replenished, 

3 And whose revenue is by great waters, 

The seed of the Nile, the harvest of the river, 
And she is a mart of nations. 

4 Be thou ashamed, O Sidon : for the sea hath spoken, 
Even the Stronghold of the sea, saying, 



ISAIAH XXIV. 



383 



I travail not, nor bring forth children, 

Neither do I nourish up young men, nor bring up virgins. 

5 As at the report concerning Egypt, 

So shall they be sorely pained at the report of Tyre. 

6 Pass ye over to Tarshish ; howl, ye inhabitants of the Isle. 

7 Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? 
Her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn. 

8 Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the dispenser of 

crowns, 

Whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable 
of the earth ? 

9 The Lord of hosts hath purposed it : 
To stain the pride of all glory, 

And to bring into contem]#all the honourable of the earth. 

10 Pass through thy land as a river, O daughter of Tarshish : 
Thy bounds are no more. 

11 He hath stretched out his hand over the sea, he hath shaken the 

kingdoms : 

The Lord hath given a commandment against Canaan, 
To destroy the strongholds thereof. 

12 And he said, Thou shalt no more rejoice, 

O thou dishonoured virgin, daughter of Sidon : 

Arise, pass over to Chittim ; there also shalt thou have no rest. 

13 Behold the land of the Chaldeans ; this people was not, 

Till the Assyrian founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness : 
They set up the towers thereof, they raised up the palaces 
thereof ; 

And these have brought her to ruin. 

14 Howl, ye ships of Tarshish : for your stronghold is laid waste. 

15 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years, according to the days 
of one king : 

After the end of seventy years shall Tyre sing as an harlot. 

16 Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been 

forgotten ; 

Make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be re- 
membered. 

17 And it shall come to pass after the end of seventy years, 
That the Lord will visit Tyre, and she shall turn to her hire, 
And shall play the harlot with all the kingdoms of the world upon 

the face of the earth. 

18 And her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the Lord : 
It shall not be treasured nor laid up ; 

For her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the 
Lord, 

To eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing. 



XXIV Behold, the Lord poureth the earth out, and maketh it 
empty 



384 



ISAIAH XXIV. 



And turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants 
thereof. 

2 And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest ; 
As with the servant, so with his master ; 

As with the maid, so with her mistress ; 
As with the buyer, so with the seller ; 
As with the lender, so with the borrower ; 
As with the creditor, so with the debtor. 

3 The land is utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled : for the Lord 

hath spoken this word. 

4 The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and 

fadeth away : 
The haughty people of the earth do languish. 

5 The land also is defiled under its inhabitants ; 

Because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, 
Broken the everlasting covenant. 

6 Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, 
And they that dwell therein are punished : 

Therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men 
left. 

7 The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merry- 

hearted do sigh. 

8 The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, 
The joy of the harp ceaseth. 

They shall not drink wine with a song ; 

Strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it. 

10 The city of confusion is broken down : 

Every house is shut up, that no man may come in. 

11 There is a crying for wine in the streets ; 

All joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone. 

12 Desolation is left in the city, and the gate is smitten with ruin. 

13 For so it shall be in the midst of the land, among the peoples, 
As the shaking of an olive tree, 

As the gleaning grapes when the vintage is done. 

14 They shall lift up their voice. 

They shall sing for the majesty of the Lord, 
They shall cry aloud from the sea. 

15 Wherefore glorify ye the Lord in the land of the sunrise, 
The name of the Lord God of Israel in the isles of the sea. 

16 From the ends of the earth have we heard songs, even glory 
to the Righteous. 

But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me ! 
The treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously : 
Yea the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously. 

17 Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the 

earth. 

18 And it shall come to pass, 

That he who fleeeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the 
pit; 



ISAIAH XXV. 



385 



And he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken 
in the snare : 

For the windows from on high are pened, and the foundations of 
the earth do shake. 

19 The earth is broken, broken up ; the earth is shattered, all 

shattered ; 

The earth doth quake, doth quake exceedingly ; 

20 The earth doth reel, doth reel like a drunken man, 
And swayeth to and fro like a hammock ; 

And her transgression is heavy upon her ; 
And she shall fall, and not rise again. 

21 And it shall come to pass in that day, 

That the Lord shall come to judge the host of the high ones that 

are on high, 
And the kings of the earth upon the earth. 

22 And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in 

the dungeon, 

And shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they 
be visited. 

23 And the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, 
For the Lord of hosts doth reign in Mount Zion, 

And in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously. 

XXV O Lord, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, 
I will praise thy name ; 
For thou hast done wonderful things ; 
Thy counsels of old are faithfulness and truth. 

2 For thou hast made of a city an heap ; 
Of a defenced city a ruin : 

A palace of strangers to be no city ; it shall never be built again. 

3 Therefore shall the strong people glorify thee, 
The city of the terrible nations shall fear thee. 

4 For thou hast been a stronghold to the poor, 
A stronghold to the needy in his distress ; 

A refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, 
When the blast of the terrible ones is like a storm against the wall. 
Thou shalt bring down the noise of strangers, as the heat in a 
drought ; 

As the heat with the shadow of a cloud, 

The song of the terrible ones shall be brought low. 

6 And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all 

peoples 

A feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, 

Of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. 

7 And he will destroy in this mountain the J'ace of the covering 

cast over all peoples, 
And the veil that is spread over all nations. . 

8 He will swallow up death in victory; 

And the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; 
And the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the 
earth ; 

c c 



386 



ISAIAH XXVI. 



For the Lord hath spoken it. 

9 And it shall be said in that day, 

Lo, this is our God ; we have waited for him, and he will save us : 
This is the Lord ; we have Avaited for him, 
We will be glad and rejoice in his salvation. 

10 For in this mountain shall the hand of the Lord rest, 
And Moab shall be trodden down under him, 

As straw is trodden down in the water of the dunghill. 

11 And he shall spread forth his hands in the midst of it, 
As he that swimmeth spreadeth forth his hands to swim : 
And He shall bring down their pride, 

Together with the spoils of their hands. 

12 And the fortress of the high fort of thy walls shall he bring 

down, 

Lay low, and bring to the ground, even to the dust. 

XXVI In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah ; 

We have a strong city ; salvation will God appoint for walls and 
bulwarks. 

2 Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the 

truth may enter in. 

3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on 

thee : 

Because he trusteth in thee. 

4 Trust ye in the Lord for ever : for in the Lord Jehovah is an 

everlasting rock : 

5 For he bringeth down them that dwell on high ; 
The lofty city, he layeth it low ; 

He layeth it low, even to the ground ; he bringeth it even to the 
dust. 

6 The foot shall tread it down, the feet of the poor, the steps of the 

needy. 

7 The way of the just is straight : thou, Most Upright, dost level the 

path of the just. 

8 Yea, in the way of thy judgments, O Lord, have we waited for 

thee ; 

The desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of 
thee. 

9 With my soul have I desired thee in the night ; 
Yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early : 
For when thy judgments are in the earth, 

The inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. 

10 Let favour be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn 

righteousness : 
In the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, 
And will not behold the majesty of the Lord. 

11 Lord, when thy hand is lifted up, they will not see: 

But they shall see, and be ashamed at thy zeal for thy people ; 
Yea, the fire of thine enemies shall devour them. 

12 Lord, thou wilt ordain peace for us : 

For thou hast wrought even all our works for us. 



ISAIAH XXVII. 



387 



13 O Lord our God, other lords beside thee have had dominion 

over us : 

But by thee only will we make mention of thy name. 

14 They are dead, they shall not live; they are shades, they shall 

not rise : 

Therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, 
And made all their memory to perish. 

15 Thou hast increased the nation, O Lord, 

Thou hast increased the nation : thou hast glorified thyself : 
Thou hadst enlarged all the borders of the land. 

16 Lord, in trouble have they visited thee, 

They poured out a whispered prayer, thy chastening was upon 
them. 

17 As a woman with child, when she draweth near the time of her 

delivery, 

Is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs ; so have we been in thy 
sight, O Lord. 

18 We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it 

were brought forth wind ; 
We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth ; 
Neither are the inhabitants of the world born, 

19 Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise : 
Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: 

For thy dew is as the dew of herbs, 
And the earth shall bring forth the dead. 

20 Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, 
And shut thy doors about thee : 

Hide thyself for a little moment, until the indignation be over- 
past. 

21 For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place, 

To punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity : 
And the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover 
her slain. 

XXVII In that day the Lord, with his sore and great and strong 
sword, 

Shall punish leviathan the fleet serpent, 
Even leviathan that coiled serpent ; 
And he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. 

2 In that day sing ye unto her, 
A vineyard of wine : — 

3 I the Lord do keep it : I will water it every moment : 
Lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day. 

4 Fury is not in me : who would set the briars and thorns against 
me in battle ? 

I would go through them, I would burn them together. 

5 Or let him take hold of my strength, 
Let him make peace with me ; let him make peace with me. 

6 In the coming time Jacob shall take root : 
Israel shall bud and blossom, and fill the face of the world with 

fruit. 

c c 2 



388 



ISAIAH XXVIII. 



7 Hath He smitten him, as He smote those that smote him ? 
Is he slain with the slaughter of their slain ? 

8 In measure, by sending her away, thou dost contend with her : 
He driveth her away by his rough wind in the day of the east 

wind. 

9 By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged ; 
And this is all its fruit: — to take away his sin, 

To break all the stones of the altar in pieces like chalkstones, 
And to raise up the images of Astarte, and of the Sun, no more. 

10 For the defenced city shall be desolate, 

The habitation forsaken, and left like a wilderness : 
There shall the calf feed, and there shall he lie down, 
And consume the branches thereof. 

11 When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off : 
The women come, and burn them up : 

For it is a people of no understanding : 

Therefore he that made them will not have mercy on them, 

And he that formed them will show them no favour. 

12 And it shall come to pass in that day, 
That the Lord shall gather in his fruit 

From the channel of the River unto the stream of Egypt, 
And ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel. 

13 And it shall come to pass in that day, 
That the great trumpet shall be blown, 

And they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of 
Assyria, 

And the outcasts in the land of Egypt, 

And shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem. 



XXVIII Woe to the crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, 

And to the fading flower of his glorious beauty, 
Which are on the head of the Tat valley of them that are over- 
come with wine ! 

2 Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, 
Which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, 

As a flood of mighty waters overflowing, hath cast it down to the 
earth with the hand. 

3 The crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim shall be trodden 

under feet : 

4 And the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, 
Shall be a fading flower, and as the early fruit before the summer ; 
Which when he that looketh upon it seeth, 

While it is yet in his hand he eateth it up. 

5 In that day shall the Lord of hosts be for a crown of glory, 
And for a diadem of beauty, unto the residue of his people, 

6 And for a spirit of judgment to him that sitteth in judgment, 
And for strength to them that turn the battle to the gate. 

7 But they also have erred through wine, 

And through Strang drink are out of the way i 



ISAIAH XXVIII. 



389 



The priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, 

They are swallowed up of wine, 

They are out of the way through strong drink ; 

They err in vision, they stumble in judgment. 

8 For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, 
So that there is no place clean. 

9 "Whom will he teach knowledge? and whom will he make to 

understand doctrine? 
"Them that are weaned from the milk, and taken from the 
breasts? 

10 " It is precept upon precept, precept upon precept ; 

"Line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little." 

11 Yea, with stammering lips and another tongue 
Will He speak to this people, 

12 Who said to them, 

This is the rest : cause the weary to rest ; and this is the refreshing ; 
But they would not hear. 

13 And the word of the Lord is unto them 
Precept upon precept, precept upon precept; 

Line upon line, line upon line ; here a little, there a little ; 
That they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, 
and taken. 

14 Wherefore hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men, 
That rule this people which is in Jerusalem. 

15 Because ye have said, 

W T e have made a covenant with death, 
And with hell are we at agreement ; 

When the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come 
unto us : 

For we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we 
hid ourselves : 

16 Therefore thus saith the Lord God, 

Behold, I have laid in Zion a foundation stone, 

A tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation : 

He that believeth shall not make haste. 

17 And I will set judgment for the line, and righteousness for the 

plummet : 

And the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, 
And the waters shall overflow the hiding place. 

18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, 
And your agreement with hell shall not stand ; 
When the overflowing scourge shall pass through, 
Then ye shall be trodden down by it. 

19 And as often as it passeth through, it shall take you : 

For morning by morning shall it pass through, by day and by 
night : 

And affliction alone will make you understand doctrine. 

20 For the bed is too short to stretch oneself : 
And the covering too narrow to wrap oneself. 

21 For the Lord shall rise up as in Mount Perazim, 



c c 3 



390 



1 SAT AH XXIX. 



He shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, 
That he may do his work, his strange work ; 
And bring to pass his act, his strange act. 

22 Now therefore be ye not mockers, lest your bands be made 

strong : 

For I have heard from the Lord God of hosts a consumption, 
Even determined upon the whole land. 

23 Give ye ear, and hear my voice ; hearken, and hear my speech. 

24 Is the ploughman always ploughing in order to sow ? 
Doth he open and break the clods of his ground? 

25 When he hath made plain the face thereof, 

Doth he not cast abroad the dill, and scatter the cummin, 
And sow the wheat in rows, and the barley in the appointed place, 
And the rye in his border ? 
2G For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him. 

27 For the dill is not threshed with the corn-sledge, 
Neither is the cart wheel turned about upon the cummin ; 

But the dill is beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod. 

28 Bread corn is bruised ; yet he is not always threshing it, 
Nor breaking it with the wheel of his cart, 

Nor bruising it with his horses. 

29 This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, 

Who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working. 

XXIX Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt ! 
Add ye year to year ; let the festivals go round. 

2 Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be heaviness and sorrow : 
And it shall be unto me as Ariel. 

3 And I will camp against thee round about, 
And will lay siege against thee with a mount, 
And I will raise forts against thee. 

4 And thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the 

ground, 

And thy speech shall be low out of the dust, 

And thy voice shall be like that of a spirit out of the ground, 

And thy speech shall whisper out of the dust. 

5 And the multitude of thy foreign invaders shall be like small dust, 
And the multitude of the terrible ones as passing chaff: 

Yea, it shall be at an instant suddenly. 

6 Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts 

W r ith thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, 
With storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire. 

7 And the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel, 
Even all that fight against her and her bulwarks, and that distress 

her, 

Shall be as a dream of a night vision. 

8 It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, 

he eateth ; 
But he awaketh, and his soul is empty : 

Or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh ; 



ISAIAH XXIX. 



391 



But he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul craveth : 
So shall the multitude of all the nations be, that fight against 
mount Zion. 

9 Waver, and wonder ; be merry, and blind : 
They are drunken, but not with wine ; 
They stagger, but not with strong drink, 

10 For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, 
And hath closed your eyes : 

The prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered. 

11 And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a sealed 

writing, 

Which men deliver to one that knows letters, saying, 

Read this, I pray thee : 

And he saith, I cannot ; for it is sealed : 

12 And the book is delivered to him that knows not letters, saying, 
Read this, I pray thee : 

And he saith, I know not letters. 

13 Wherefore the Lord hath said, 

Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, 

And with their lips do honour me, 

But have removed their heart far from me, 

A nd their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men : 

14 Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among 

this people, 
Even a marvellous work and a wonder ; 
For the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, 
And the understanding of their prudent men shall hide itself for 

shame. 

15 Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the 
Lord, 

And their works are in the dark, 

And they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? 

16 Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as 

the potter's clay : 
For shall the work say of hini that made it, He made me not ? 
Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, 
He had no understanding? 

17 Is it not yet a very little while, and Lebanon shall be turned into 

a fruitful field, 
And the fruitful field shall be reckoned to the forest ? 

18 And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, 

And the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of 
darkness. 

19 The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord, 

And the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. 

20 For the terrible one is brought to nought, and the scorner ceaseth, 
And all that watch for iniquity are cut off : 

21 That make a man an offender for a word, 

And lay a snare for him that reproveth in the gate, 



c c 4 



392 



ISAIAH XXX. 



And turn aside the just for a thing of nought. 

22 Therefore thus saith the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, 
Concerning the house of Jacob : — 

Jacob shall no more be ashamed, neither shall his face any more 
wax pale. 

23 But when he seeth his children, the work of mine hands, in the 

midst of him, 

They shall sanctify my name, and sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, 
And shall fear the God of Israel. 

24 They also that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, 
And the murinurers shall learn doctrine. 

XXX Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord, 

That take counsel, but not of me ; 
And that weave a web, but not of my spirit, 
That they may add sin to sin : 

2 That walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my 

mouth ; 

To strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, 
And to trust in the shadow of Egypt ! 

3 Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, 
And the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion. 

4 For his princes are at Zoan, and his ambassadors come to Hanes. 

5 They are all ashamed of a people that can not profit them, 
Nor be an help nor profit, but a shame, and also a reproach. 

6 O the burden of the beasts travelling southwards ! 
Through a land of trouble and anguish, 

From whence come the lioness and the fierce lion, 
The viper and fiery flying serpent : 

They carry their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, 
And their treasures upon the bunches of camels, 
To a people that shall not profit them. 

7 For the Egyptians shall help in vain, and to no purpose : 
Therefore have I called her the blusterer that sitteth still. 

8 Now go, write it before them on a table, and note it in a book, 
That it may be for the time to come for ever and ever : 

9 For this is a rebellious people, lying children, 
Children that will not hear the law of the Lord : 

10 Which say to the seers, Ye shall not see ; 

And to the prophets, Ye shall not not prophesy unto us right 
things ; 

Speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits : 

11 Get out of the way, turn aside out of the path, 
Cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us. 

12 Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, 
Because ye despise this word, 

And trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon : 

13 Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, 

l Swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at 
an instant. 



ISAIAH XXX. 



393 



14 And it shall be broken as when an earthen pitcher is broken in 

pieces, — broken unsparingly, 
So that there is not to be found, among its fragments, 
A sherd to take fire from the hearth, 
Or to take water withal out of the well. 

15 For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel ; 
In returning and rest shall ye be saved ; 

In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength : 
And ye would not. 

16 But ye said, No ; for we will flee upon horses ; 
Therefore shall ye flee : 

And, We will ride upon the swift ; 
Therefore shall they that pursue you be swift. 

17 One thousand shall flee at the rebuke of one ; 
At the rebuke of five shall ye flee : 

Till ye be left as a flag-staff' upon the top of a mountain, 
And as a signal on an hill. 

is And therefore will the Lord wait, that he may be gracious 

unto you, 

And therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon 
you : 

For the Lord is a God of righteousness : 
Blessed are all they that wait for him. 

19 For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem : 
Thou shalt weep no more : 

He will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy cry ; 
When he shall hear it, he will answer thee. 

20 And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the 

water of affliction, 
Yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, 
But thine eyes shall see thy teachers : 

21 And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, 
This is the way, walk ye in it, 

When ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. 

22 Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images of silver, 
And the ornament of thy molten images of gold : 

Thou shalt cast them away as a loathsome thing ; 
Thou shalt say unto it, Get thee hence. 

23 Then shall he give rain for thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground 

withal ; 

And bread of the increase of the earth, and it shall be fat and 
plenteous : 

In that day shall thy cattle feed in large pastures. 

24 The oxen and the young asses that till the ground shall eat well- 

seasoned provender, 
Which hath been winnowed with the shovel and with the fan. 

25 And there shall be upon every lofty mountain, and upon every high 

hill, 

Rivers, and streams of waters, 



394 



ISAIAH XXXI. 



In the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. 

26 And the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, 

And the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven 
days, 

In the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of his people, 
And healeth the stroke of their wound. 

27 Behold, the name of the Lord cometh from far, 
His anger burning, and its flame going up heavily : 

His lips are full of indignation, and his tongue as a devouring 
fire : 

28 And his breath as an overflowing stream, shall reach to the midst 

of the neck. 

He will sift the nations with the sieve of perdition : 
And will put a bridle in the jaws of the peoples, to lead them 
astray. 

29 Ye shall have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept ; 
And gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe 

To come into the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Israel. 

30 And the Lord shall cause the majesty of his voice to be heard, 
And shall show the lighting down of his arm. 

With the indignation of anger and a flame of devouring fire, 
With scattering, and tempest, and stones of hail. 

31 For through the voice of the Lord shall the Assyrian be beaten 

down. 

He shall smite him with a rod. 

32 And every stroke of the staff of doom, which the Lord shall lay 

upon him, 

Shall be with tabrets and harps : and with fierce battles will he 
fight against them. 

33 For Tophet is ordained of old ; yea, for the king it is prepared; 
He hath made it deep and large : the pile thereof is fire and much 

wood ; 

The breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it. 

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help ; and stay 
on horses, 

And trust in chariots, because they are many ; 
And in horsemen, because they are very strong ; 
But that look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the 
Lord ! 

Yet He also is wise, and bringeth evil, and doth not call back his 
words : 

And he riseth up against the house of the evildoers, 
And against the help of them that work iniquity. 
And the Egyptians are men, and not God ; 
And their horses flesh, and not spirit. 
And the Lord shall stretch out his hand, 

And he that helpeth shall fall, and he that is holpen shall fall 
down, 

And they all shall perish together. 



ISAIAH XXXII. 



395 



4 For thus hath the Lord spoken unto me, 

Like as the lion and the young lion growling over his prey, 
When a multitude of shepherds is called forth against him, 
He is not afraid of their voice, nor abaseth himself for the noise 
of them : 

So shall the Lord of hosts come down to fight for mount Zion, 
and for the hill thereof. 

5 As the mother birds hovering over their young, 
So will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem ; 
Defend and deliver, pass over and save. 

6 Return ye unto Him from whom ye have so deeply revolted, 
O sons of Israel. 

7 For in that day every man shall cast away his idols of silver, and 

his idols of gold, 
Which your own hands have made unto you for a sin. 

8 Then shall the Assyrian fall by the sword, not of a man ; 
And the sword, not of a mortal, shall devour him : 

And he shall flee from the sword, and his young warriors shall be 
bondsmen. 

9 And he shall pass over to his strong hold for fear, 
And his princes shall be afraid of every standard, 

Saith the Lord, whose fire is in Zion, and his furnace in Jerusalem, 

XXXII Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, 

And princes shall rule in judgment. 

2 And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, 
And a covert from the storm ; 

As rivers of water in a dry place, 

As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 

3 And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, 
And the ears of them that hear shall hearken. 

4 And the heart of the reckless shall understand knowledge, 

And the tongue of the stammerer shall be ready to speak plainly. 

5 The vile person shall be no more called honourable, 
Nor the churl said to be bountiful. 

6 For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work 

iniquity, 

To practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the Lord, 

To make empty the soul of the hungry, 

And he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. 

7 The instruments also of the churl are evil : he deviseth wicked 

devices 

To destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy 
speaketh right. 

8 But the liberal deviseth liberal things ; and on liberal things doth 

he take his stand. 

9 Rise up, ye women that are at ease ; 

Hear my voice, ye careless daughters ; give ear unto my speech. 

10 In a year and day shall ye be troubled, ye careless women: 
For the vintage faileth, the gathering shall not come. 



396 



ISAIAH XXX11I. 



11 Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless 

ones : 

Strip you, and make you bare, and gird sackcloth upon your 
loins : 

12 Beating on the breasts, for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine. 

13 Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers ; 
Yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city. 

14 For the palace is forsaken ; the crowd of the city left ; 

Hill, fort, and tower are dens for ever, a joy of wild asses, a pas- 
ture of flocks ; 

15 Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, 

And the wilderness become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field 
be reckoned to the forest. 

16 And judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness 

abide in the fruitful field ; 

17 And the work of righteousness shall be peace ; 

And the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever. 

18 And my people shall dwell in a home of peace, 
And in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places ; 

19 And it shall hail, to the downfall of the forest ; 
And the city shall be low in a low place. 

20 Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, 
That send forth the feet of the ox and the ass. 

XXXIII Woe to thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled ; 

And dealest treacherously, and they dealt not treacherously with 
thee ! 

When thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled ; 
When thou hast done dealing treacherously, 
They shall deal treacherously with thee. 

2 O Lord, be gracious unto us ; we wait for thee : 

Be thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time 
of trouble. 

3 At the voice of thy mouth the peoples flee ; 
At thy rising up the nations are scattered. 

4 And your spoil shall be gathered like the gathering of the cater- 

pillar : 

As the running to and fro of locusts shall they run upon it. 

5 The Lord is exalted ; for he dwelleth on high : 

He hath filled Zion with judgment and righteousness. 

6 And He shall be the stability of thy times, 

Thy strength of salvation, wisdom and knowledge : 
The fear of the Lord is his treasure. 

7 Behold, their valiant ones cry without : 
The ambassadors of peace weep bitterly. 

8 The highways lie waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth : 

He hath broken the covenant, he hath despised the cities, he 
regardeth no man. 

9 The earth mourneth and languisheth : 
Lebanon is ashamed and withereth away : 



ISAIAH XXXIV. 



397 



Sharon is like a wilderness ; and Bashan and Carmel cast their 
leaves. 

10 Now will I rise, shall the Lord say ; 

Now will I be exalted ; now will 1 lift up myself. 

11 Ye shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble : 
Your breath, as fire, shall devour you. 

12 And the people shall be as the burnings of lime : 
As thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire. 

13 Hear, ye that are far ofi', what I have done ; 
And, ye that are near, acknowledge my might. 

14 The sinners in Zion are afraid ; fearfulness had surprised the 

hypocrites. 

Who among us can abide the devouring fire ? 
Who among us can abide perpetual burnings ? 

15 He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly ; 
He that despiseth the gain of oppressions, 

That shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, 
That stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, 
And shutteth his eyes from looking at evil ; 
1 i He shall dwell in high places : 

His place of defence shall be the strongholds of rocks : 
Bread shall be given him ; his waters shall be sure. 

17 Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty : 
They shall behold the distant country. 

18 Thine heart shall meditate on the past terror. 
Where is he that counted ? where is he that weighed ? 
Where is the receiver? where is he that counted the towers? 

19 Thou sbalt not see a fierce people, 

A people of deep speech that thou canst not hear ; 
Of a barbarous tongue, that thou canst not understand. 
£0 Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities : 

Thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet home, 
A tent that shall not be taken down ; 
Not one of its stakes shall ever be pulled up, 
Neither shall any of its cords be broken. 

21 But there shall the Lord be mighty for us, a place of broad rivers 

and streams ; 

Wherein shall go no oared galley^ neither shall gallant ship pass 
thereby. 

22 For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, 
The Lord is our king ; he will save us. 

23 Thy tacklings are loosed ; 

They cannot hold the mast upright, they cannot spread the sail : 
Then is the booty of a great spoil divided ; the lame take the 
prey. 

24 And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick : 

The people that dwell therein are forgiven their iniquity. 



XXXIV Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye peoples: 

Let the earth hear, and all that is therein ; 



398 



ISAIAH XXXIV. 



The world, and all things that come forth of it. 

2 For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his vvratli 

upon all their armies : 
He hath utterly doomed them, he hath delivered them to the 
slaughter. 

3 And their slain shall be cast out, 

And the stench of their carcases shall go up, 

And the mountains shall be melted with their blood. 

4 And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, 

And the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll : 
And all their host shall fall down, 
As the withered leaf falleth off from the vine, 
And as the blighted fruit from the fig tree. 

5 For my sword is bathed in heaven : 
Behold, it shall come down upon Edom, 

And upon the people of my doom, for judgment. 

6 The sword of the Lord is glutted with blood, it is gorged with 

fat, 

With the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of 
rams : 

For the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in 
the land of Edom. 

7 And the buffaloes fall down with them, 
And the bullocks with the bulls ; 

And their land shall be drunken with blood, and their dust made 
rich with fat. 

8 For it is the day of the Lorp's vengeance, 

And the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion. 

9 And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, 
And the dust thereof into brimstone, 

And the land thereof shall become burning pitch. 

10 It shall not be quenched night nor day ; 
The smoke thereof shall go up for ever : 

From generation to generation it shall lie waste ; 
None shall pass through it for ever and ever. 

11 And it shall be an heritage for the pelican and the porcupine ; 
The bittern also and the raven shall dwell in it : 

And He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the 
plummet of emptiness. 

12 They shall call her nobles to the kingdom, 

But none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. 

13 And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in 

her fortresses ; 

And she shall be the home of wol ves, and a court for the daughters 
of the ostrich ; 

14 And the wild beasts shall meet with the howling beast, 
And the he-goat shall cry to his fellow ; 

The screech owl also shall pitch there, and find for herself a place 
of rest. 

15 There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and 

gather under her shadow : 



ISAIAH XXXV. XXX VI. 



399 



There shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her 
mate. 

16 Seek ye out of the book of the Lord, and read : 

No one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate : 
For my mouth it hath commanded, and His spirit it hath gathered 
them. 

17 And He hath cast the lot for them, and His hand hath divided it 

unto them by line : 
They shall possess it as an heritage for ever, 
From generation to generation shall they dwell therein. 

XXXV The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad for 

them ; 

And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. 

2 It shall blossom, it shall blossom and rejoice, 
Yea, with joy and singing: 

The glory of Lebanon is given unto it, the excellency of Carmel 
and Sharon ; 

They shall see the glory of the Lord, the excellency of our God. 

3 Strengthen ye the hands now dropping, 
And confirm the knees now tottering : 

4 Say to the faint heart, Be strong, fear not : 

Behold, your God ! Vengeance cometh : the recompence of God : 
He will come and save you. 

5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, 
And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. 

6 Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the 

dumb shall shout : 
For in the wilderness have waters broken out, and streams in the 
desert. 

7 And the mirage shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground bub- 

bling springs, 

In the habitation of wolves, in their lair, in the place of reeds and 
rushes. 

8 And an highway shall be there, and a way, 
And it shall be called The way of holiness ; 

The unclean shall not pass over it ; but it shall be for those : 
The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. 

9 No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beasts go up 

thereon ; 

It shall not be found there ; but the redeemed shall walk there : 
10 And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, 

And come to Zion with shouts, and everlasting joy upon their 
heads : 

Joy and gladness shall overtake them, and sorrow and sighing shall 
flee away. 



XXXVI Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of king 

Hezekiah, that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all 
2 the fortified cities of Judah, and took them. And the king of 



400 



ISAIAH XXXVI. 



Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem, unto king 
Hezekiah with a great army. And he stood by the aqueduct of 

3 the upper pool, in the highway of the fuller's field. Then came 
forth unto him Eliakim, Hilkiah's son, which was over the house, 
And Shebna the secretary, and Joah, Asaph's son, the recorder. 

4 And Rabshakeh said unto them, Say ye now to Hezekiah, Thus 
saith the great king, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this 

5 wherein thou trustest ? I say, words, mere words, are thy counsel 
and strength for war: now on whom dost thou trust, that thou 

6 rebellest against me ? Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken 
reed, on Egypt : whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, 
and pierce it: so is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all that trust in 

7 him. But if thou say to me, We trust in the Lord our God : is 
it not he, whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath 

8 taken away, and said to Judah and to Jerusalem, Ye shall worship 
before this altar? Now therefore, I pray thee, engage with my 
master the king of Assyria, and I will give thee two thousand 

9 horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them. How 
then wilt thou turn away the face of one captain of the least of 
my master's servants, and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots and 

10 for horsemen ? And am I now come up without the Lord 
against this land to destroy it? The Lord said unto me, Go up 
against this land, and destroy it. 

11 Then said Eliakim and Shebna and Joah unto Rabshakeh, 
Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants in Syrian ; for we under- 
stand it : and speak not to us in Jewish, in the ears of the people 

12 that are on the wall. But Rabshakeh said, Hath my master 
sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words ? hath he 
not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, only to die with 
you by famine and thirst ? 

3 Then Rabshakeh stood, and cried with a loud voice in Jewish, 
and said, Hear ye the words of the great king, the king of Assyria. 

14 Thus saith the king, Let not Hezekiah deceive you : for he shall 

15 not be able to deliver you. Neither let Hezekiah make you trust 
in the Lord, saying, The Lord will surely deliver us : this city 
shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria. 

16 Hearken not to Hezekiah ; for thus saith the king of Assyria, 
Make peace with me, and come out to me : and eat ye every one 
of his vine, and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye every one 

17 the waters of his own cistern; until I come and take you away 
to a land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a land of 

18 bread and vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, 
The Lord will deliver us. Hath any of the gods of the nations 
delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? 

19 Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad ? where are the gods 
of Sepharvaim ? and have they delivered Samaria out of my 

20 hand ? Who are they among all the gods of these lands, that 
have delivered their land out of my hand, that the Lord should 
deliver Jerusalem out of my hand ? 

21 And they held their peace, and answered him not a word : for 
the king's commandment was, saying, Answer him not. 



ISAIAH XXXVII, 



401 



22 Then came Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, that was over the 
household, and Shebna the secretary, and Joah, the son of Asaph, 
the recorder, to Hezekiah with their clothes rent, and told him 
the words of Rabshakeh. 
XXVII And it came to pass, when king Hezekiah heard it, that he 
rent his clothes, and covered himself with sackcloth, and went 

2 into the house of the Lord. And he sent Eliakim, who was over 
the household, and Shebna the secretary, and the elders of the 
priests covered with sackcloth, unto Isaiah the prophet the son of 

3 Amoz. And they said unto him, Thus saith Hezekiah, This day 
is a day of trouble, and of rebuke, and of blasphemy : for the 
children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring 

4 forth. It may be the Lord thy God will hear the words of Rab- 
shakeh, whom the king of Assyria his master hath sent to reproach 
the living God, and will reprove the words which the Lord thy 
God hath heard : wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant 
that is left. 

5 So the servants of king Hezekiah came to Isaiah. And Isaiah 

6 said unto them, Thus shall ye say unto your master, Thus saith 
the Lord, Be not afraid of the words that thou hast heard, 
wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed 

7 me. Behold, I send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a 
rumour, and return to his own land ; and I will cause him to fall 
by the sword in his own land. 

8 So Rabshakeh returned, and found the king of Assyria warring 
against Libnah : for he had heard that he had broken up from 

9 Lachish. And he heard say concerning Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, 
He is come forth to make war with thee. And when he heard it, 

10 he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying, Thus shall ye speak to 
Hezekiah, king of Judah, saying, Let not thy God, in whom thou 
trustest, deceive thee, saying, Jerusalem shall not be given into 

11 the hand of the king of Assyria. Behold, thou hast heard what 
the kings of Assyria have done to all lands by destroying them 

12 utterly ; and shalt thou be delivered ? Have the gods of the 
nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed, as Gozan, 
and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which were 

13 in Telassar? Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of 
Arphad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah ? 

14 And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the mes- 
sengers, and read it : and Hezekiah went up unto the house of 

15 the Lord, and spread it before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed 

16 unto the Lord, saying, O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, that 
dwellest between the cherubim, thou art the God, even thou 
alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth : thou hast made heaven 

17 and earth. Incline thine ear, O Lord, and hear ; open thine eyes, 
O Lord, and see : and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which 

18 hath sent to reproach the living God. Of a truth, Lord, the 
kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations, and their 

19 countries, and have cast their gods into the fire: for they v ere no 
gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone : therefore 

D D 



402 



ISAIAH XXXVII. 



20 they have destroyed them. Now therefore, O Lord our God, 
save us from his hand, That all the kingdoms of the earth may 
know that thou art the Lord, even thou only. 

21 And Isaiah the son of Amoz sent unto Hezekiah, saying, Thus 
saith the Lord God of Israel, Whereas thou hast prayed to me 

22 against Sennacherib king of Assyria ; this is the word which the 
Lord hath spoken concerning him ; 

The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee, 
And laughed thee to scorn ; 

The daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee. 

23 Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? 
And against whom hast thou exalted thy voice, 
And lifted up thine eyes on high ? 

Even against the Holy One of Israel. 

24 By thy servants hast thou reproached the Lord, and hast said, 
By the multitude of my chariots am I come up 

To the height of the mountains, to the sides of Lebanon : 
And I will cut down the tall cedars thereof, and the choice fir 
trees thereof : 

And I will enter into his farthest height, and into his garden- 
forest. 

25 I have digged, and drunk water; 

And with the sole of my feet will I dry up all the rivers of 
Egypt. 

26 Hast thou not heard ? From afar have I done it ; 
From the days of old have I prepared it. 

Now have I brought it to pass, and it is : — 
Defenced cities are laid waste into ruinous heaps : 

27 And their inhabitants are of small power, 
They are dismayed and confounded : 

They are grass of the field, and green herbage, 

Grass on the housetops, and corn blasted before it be grown up. 

28 But I know thy abode, and thy going out, 
And thy coming in, and thy rage against me. 

29 Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into mine 

ears, 

Therefore will I put my hook in thy nose, and my bridle in thy lips, 
And I will turn thee back by the way by which thou earnest. 

30 And this shall be the sign unto thee ; 
Eat this year what groweth of itself; 

And the second year that which springeth of the same : 

And in the third year sow ye, and reap, 

And plant vineyards, and eat the fruit thereof. 

31 And the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah 
Shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward : 

32 For out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, 
And they that escape out of mount Zion : 
The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall do this. 

33 Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning the king of 
Assyria, 



ISAIAH XXXVIIT. 



403 



He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, 
Nor come before it with shields, nor cast up a mound against it. 

34 By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, 
And shall not come into this city, saith the Lord. 

35 For I will defend this city to save it, 

For my own sake and for my servant David's sake. 

36 And the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp 
of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand : and 

37 when they arose early in the morning, behold they were all dead 
corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria decamped, and departed, 

38 and returned, and remained in Nineveh. And it came to pass, as 
he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adram- 

39 melech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword ; and 
they escaped into the land of Armenia; and Esar-haddon his 
son reigned in his stead. 



XXXVIII In those days was Hezekiah sick, at the point of death. 

And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came unto him, and 
said unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Set thine house in order : 

2 for thou art dying, and shalt not live. Then Hezekiah turned his 

3 face toward the wall, and prayed unto the Lord, and said, Re- 
member now, O Lord, I beseech thee, how I have walked before 
thee in truth and with a whole heart, and have done that which 
is good in thy sight. And Hezekiah wept sore. 

4 And the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, saying, Go, and say 

5 to Hezekiah, Thus saith the Lord, the God of David thy father, 
I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears : behold, I will add 

6 unto thy days fifteen years. And I will deliver thee and this city 
out of the hand of the king of Assyria : and I will defend this 

7 city. And this is the sign unto thee from the Lord, that the 
Lord will perform this word that he hath spoken ; Behold, I am 
causing the shadow to go back the degrees which it has gone 

8 down on the sun-dial of Ahaz ten degrees backward. And the sun 
returned ten degrees, by which degrees it had gone down. 

9 The writing of Hezekiah king op Judah, when he had 
been sick, and was recovered of his sickness. 

10 I said, I shall go to the gates of the grave in the midst of my days : 
I am deprived of the residue of my years. 

11 I said, I hall not see the Lord, the Lord in the land of the living : 
I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world. 

12 My generation is departed, and is removed from me as a shepherd's 
tent : 

I have cut off like a weaver my life : 
He will cut me off from the loom : 
From day to night wilt thou make an end of me. 

13 I reckoned till morning, that, as a lion, so will he break all my 
bones : 

From day to night wilt thou make an end of me. 

D D 2 



404 



ISAIAH XXXIX. 



14 Like a crane or a swallow, so I cry : I do mourn as a dove : 
Mine eyes fail with looking upward : 

0 Lord, I am oppressed : undertake for me. 

15 What shall I say ? 

He hath both spoken unto me, and Himself hath done it : 

1 shall go softly all my years, for the bitterness of my soul. 

16 O Lord, by these things men live, 

And in all these things is the life of my spirit : 
So wilt thou recover me, and make me to live. 

17 Behold, my great bitterness is turned to peace. 

And thou hast loved my soul from the pit of corruption : 
For thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. 

18 For the grave cannot praise thee, death can not celebrate thee: 
They that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. 

19 The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day : 
The father to the children shall make known thy truth. 

20 The Lord to save me ! 

And we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments 
All the days of our life, in the house of the Lord. 

21 For Isaiah had said, Let them take a lump of figs, and lay it 

22 for a plaister upon the boil, and he shall recover. Hezekiah also 
had said, What is the sign that I shall go up to the house of the 
Lord ? 



XXXIX At that time Merodach-Baladan, the son of Baladan, King of 
Babylon, sent letters and a present to Hezekiah : for he had heard 

2 that he had been sick, and was recovered. And Hezekiah was 
glad of them, and showed them his house of precious things, the 
silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious ointment, 
and all the house of his arms, and all that was found in his 
treasures : there was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, 
that Hezekiah showed them not. 

3 Then came Isaiah the prophet unto king Hezekiah, and said 
unto him, What said these men? and from whence came they 
unto thee ? And Hezekiah said, They are come from a far 

4 country unto me, from Babylon. Then said he, What have they 
seen in thine house ? And Hezekiah answered, All that is in 
mine house have they seen : there is nothing among my treasures 
that I have not showed them. 

5 And Isaiah said to Hezekiah, Hear the word of the Lord of 

6 hosts : Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house, 
and that which thy fathers have laid up in store until this day, 
shall be carried to Babylon : nothing shall be left, saith the Lord. 

7 And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt beget, 
shall they take away ; and they shall be eunuchs in the palace 
of the king of Babylon. 

8 And Hezekiah said to Isaiah, Good is the word of the Lord 
which thou hast spoken. And he said, For there shall be peace 
and truth in my days. 



ISAIAH XL. 



405 



XL Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, shall your God say. 

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, 
That her warfare is accomplished, 
That her iniquity is pardoned : 

For she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins. 

3 A voice of one crying in the wilderness, 
Prepare ye the way of the Lord, 

Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 

4 Every valley shall be raised, and every mountain and hill shall 

be made low : 

And the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places 
plain : 

5 And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall 

see it together : 
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 

6 A voice saying, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry ? 

All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower 
of the field : 

7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, 
Because the breath of the Lord bloweth upon it : 
Surely the people is grass. 

8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth : 

But the word of our God shall stand for ever. 

9 O thou that bringest good tidings to Zion, 
Get thee up into a high mountain ; 

O thou that bringest good tidings to Jerusalem, 

Lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid ; 

Say unto the cities of Judah, Behold, your God ! 

10 Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, 
And his arm shall rule for him : 

Behold, his reward is with him, and his wages before him. 

11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd : 
He shall gather the lambs with his arm, 

And carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead the nursing 
ewes. 

12 Who hath meted out the waters in the hollow of his hand, 
And measured heaven with the span, 

And comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, 
And weighed the mountains in scales, 
And the hills in a balance ? 

13 Who hath measured the Spirit of the Loud, 

Or being his counsellor will make Him to know ? 

14 With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him, 

And taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him know- 
ledge, 

And will make him to know the way of understanding ? 

15 Behold, the nations are as a drop from a bucket, 
And are counted as dust on the scales : 

Behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing, 

16 And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, 

D D 3 



406 



ISAIAH XLI. 



Nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. 

17 AH nations before him are as nothing ; 

And they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity. 

18 To whom then will ye liken God? 

Or what likeness will ye compare unto Him ? 

19 To the image which a carver hath wrought, 

And the goldsmith will spread it over with gold, and casteth 
silver chains ! 

20 He that is impoverished by oblations chooseth a tree that will not 

rot ; 

He seeketh unto him a cunning workman, 

To prepare a graven image that shall not be moved ! 

21 Will ye not know ? will ye not hear? 

Hath it not been told you from the beginning ? 

Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth ? 

22 It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, 
And the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers ; 
That stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, 
And spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in : 

23 That bringeth the princes to nothing ; 

He maketh the judges of the earth as vanity. 

24 Yea, they were not planted ; yea, they were not sown : 
Yea, their stock hath not taken root in the earth : 
And He hath breathed upon them, and they withered, 
And the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble. 

25 To whom then will ye liken me, — -or shall I be equal?—- 
saith the Holy One. 

26 Lift up your eyes on high, and see : 

Who hath created these — bringing out their host by number? 
He calleth them all by name, 

By the greatness of his might, for that He is strong in power ; 
Not one faileth. 

27 Why wilt thou say, O Jacob, and why thus speak, O Israel, 
My way is hid from the Lord, 

And my cause will be passed over by my God ? 

28 Hast thou not known ? hast thou not heard, 

That the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of 
the earth, 

Will not faint, neither be weary ? there is no searching of his un- 
derstanding. 

29 He giveth power to the faint ; and to them that have no might he 

increaseth strength. 

30 Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall 

utterly fall : ' 

31 But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength ; 
They shall raise the wing like eagles ; 

They shall run, and not be weary, they shall, walk, and not faint. 

XLI Keep silence before me, O islands; and let the people renew 
their strength. 
Let them come near ; then let them speak : 



ISAIAH XLI. 



407 



Let us come near to the judgment seat together. 

2 Who hath raised up one from the east? 
Righteousness shall call hiin to its foot, 

Shall give the nations before him, and make him tread upon kings : 
Shall give them as the dust to his sword, and as driven stubble to 
his bow. 

3 He shall pursue them, he shall pass safely ; he shall not touch the 

ground with his feet. 

4 Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the 

beginning ? 

I the Lord, the first, and with the last : I am He. 

5 The isles have seen it, and feared ; 

The ends of the earth tremble, have drawn near, and come. 

6 They will help every one his neighbour ; 

And every one will say to his brother, Be of good courage. 
And the carpenter has encouraged the goldsmith, 
And he that smootheth with the hammer him that smiteth the 
anvil, 

7 Saying of the soldering, it is good : 

And he has fastened it with nails ; it shall not be moved. 

8 But thou, Israel, my servant, 

Jacob whom I have chosen ; the seed of Abraham my friend ; 

9 Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, 
And called thee from the sides thereof, 

And said unto thee, Thou art my servant, I have chosen thee, and 
not cast thee away ; 
10 Fear thou not ; for I am with thee : be not dismayed ; for I am 
thy God : 

I have strengthened thee ; yea, I have helped thee ; 
Yea, I have upheld thee with the right hand of my righteousness, 
n Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed 

and confounded : 
They shall be as nothing ; and they that strive with thee shall 

perish. 

12 Thou shalt seek them, and shalt not find them, even them that con- 

tended with thee : 
They that war against thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of 
nought. 

13 For I the Lord thy God do hold thy right hand, 
Saying unto thee, Fear not ; I have helped thee. 

14 Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel ; 

I have helped thee, saith the Lord, and thy redeemer, the Holy 
One of Israel. 

15 Behold, I have made of thee a new sharp threshing instrument 

having teeth ; 

Thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, 
And shalt make the hills as chaff. 

16 Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, 
And the whirlwind shall scatter them : 

D D 4 



408 



ISAIAH XLII. 



And thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, 

And shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel. 

17 The poor and needy seek water, and there is none, 
And their tongue faileth for thirst : 

I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake 
them. 

18 I will open rivers on bare hills, and fountains in the midst of the 

valleys : 

^1 will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry lands 
springs of water. 

19 I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, and the myrtle, 

and the oil tree ; 

I will set in the desert the fir tree, the pine, and the box tree to- 
gether : 

20 That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand toge- 

ther, 

That the hand of the Lord hath done this, 
And the Holy One of Israel hath created it. 

21 Produce your cause, will the Lord say ; 

Bring forth your strong reasons, will the King of Jacob say. 

22 Let them bring forth, and show us, the things that shall happen : 
Let them show the former things, what they were, 

That we may consider them, and know the latter end of them : 
Or declare us things for to come. 

23 Show the things that are to come hereafter, 
That we may know that ye are gods : 

Yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it 
together. 

24 Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought : 
An abomination is he that chooseth you. 

25 I have raised up one from the north, and he hath come i 
From the rising of the sun shall he call upon my name : 

And he shall come upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter 
treadeth clay. 

26 Who hath declared from the beginning, that we may know ? 
And beforetime, that we may say, It is right ? 

Yea, there is none that showeth, yea, there is none that declareth, 
Yea, there is none that heareth your words. 

27 I am the first to say to Zion, Behold, behold them: 
And to give to Jerusalem one that bringeth good tidings. 

28 For I will look, but there is no one, 

Even among these idols, but there is no counsellor, 
That, when I ask of them can answer a word. 

29 Behold, they are all vanity ; their works are nothing : 
Their molten images are wind and emptiness. 

XLII Behold my servant, I will uphold him ; 
Mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth ; 

I have put my spirit upon him : he shall bring forth judgment to 
the nations. 

2 He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the 
street. 



ISAIAH XLII. 



409 



3 A bruised reed shall he not break, 

Arid the dimly burning flax shall he not quench : 
He shall bring forth judgment unto truth. 

4 He shall not be dim, nor bruised, 

Till he have set judgment in the earth : 
And the isles shall wait for his law. 

5 Thus saith God the Lord, 

He that createth the heavens, and stretcheth them out ; 
He that spreadeth forth the earth, and that which cometh out of 
it; 

He that giveth breath unto the people upon it, 
And spirit to them that walk therein : 

6 I the Loud have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine 

hand, 

And will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, 
For a light of the Gentiles ; 

7 To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoner from the prison, 
And them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. 

8 I am the Lord : that is my name : 

And my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to 
graven images. 

9 Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I 
declare : 

Before they spring forth I will tell you of them. 

10 Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end 
of the earth, 

Ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein ; 
The isles, and the inhabitants thereof. 

11 The wilderness and the cities thereof shall lift up their voice, 
The villages that Kedar doth inhabit : 

The inhabitants of the Rock shall sing, 

They shall shout from the top of the mountain. 

12 They shall give glory unto the Lord, and shall declare his praise 

in the islands. 

13 The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man, 
He shall stir up his zeal like a man of war : 

He shall shout, yea, roar; he shall behave himself mightily against 
his enemies. 

14 I have long time holden my peace ; I have been still, and re- 
frained myself : 

Now will I cry like a travailing woman ; I will destroy and devour 
at once. 

15 I will make waste mountains and hills, and dry up all their herb- 

age; 

And I will make the rivers islands, and I will dry up the pools. 

16 And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not ; 
I will lead them in paths that they have not known : 

I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. 
These are my words : I do them, and forsake them not. 

17 They are turned back, they shall be utterly ashamed, 



410 



ISAIAH XLIII. 



That trust in graven images, 

That say to the molten images, Ye are our gods. 

18 Hear, ye deaf ; and look, ye blind, that ye may see. 

19 Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger, whom I 

will send ? 

Who is blind as he that is consecrated, and blind as the Lord's 
servant ? 

20 Thou hast seen many things, but not observed ; 
Thou openest the ears, but wilt not hear. 

21 The Lord is well pleased, for his righteousness sake, 
To magnify the law, and make it honourable. 

22 But this is a people robbed and spoiled ; 

They are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison 
houses : 

They are for a prey, and none delivereth ; 
For a spoil, and none saith, Restore. 

23 Who among you will give ear to this ? 
Who will hearken and hear for the time to come ? 

24 Who gave Jacob for a spoil, and Israel to the robbers ? 
Did not the Lord, against whom we have sinned ? 

For they would not walk in his ways, neither were they obedient 
unto his law. 

25 Therefore He hath poured upon him the fury of his anger, and the 

strength of battle : 
And it hath set him on fire round about, yet he knew not ; 
And it burned him, yet he will not lay it to heart. 

XLIII But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, 

And he that formed thee, O Israel, 
Fear not : for I have redeemed thee ; 
I have called thee by thy name ; thou art mine. 

2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee ; 
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee : 

When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned ; 
Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. 

3 For I the Lord thy God, the Holy one of Israel, thy Saviour, 
Have given Egypt for thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee. 

4 Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, 
And I have loved thee : 

And I will give men for thee, and nations for thy life. 

5 Fear not : for I am with thee : 

I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the 
west ; 

6 I will say to the north, Give up ; and to the south, Keep not 

back : 

Bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the 
earth; 

7 Even every one that is called by my name : 
For I have created him for my glory : 

I have formed him, yea, I have made him, 



ISAIAH XLIII. 



411 



8 He hath brought forth the blind people, and they have eyes, 
And the deaf, and they have ears. 

9 Let all the nations be gathered together, and let the peoples be 

assembled : 

Who among them can declare this, and show us former things ? 
Let them produce their witnesses, that they may be justified : 
Or let them hear me, and say, It is the truth. 

10 Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I 

have chosen : 

That ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he : 
Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after 
me. 

11 I, even I, am the Lord ; and beside me there is no saviour. 

12 I have declared, and have saved, and have showed, 
And there is no strange god among you : 

Therefore ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God. 

13 Yea, before the day was I am he ; 

And there is none that can deliver out of my hand : 
I will work, and who shall let it ? 

14 Thus saith the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of 
Israel ; 

For your sake I have sent to Babylon, 
And have brought down all their nobles, 
And the Chaldeans, whose cry is in the ships. 

15 I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King. 

16 Thus saith the Lord, 

Which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters ; 
II Which bringeth forth the chariot and horse, the army and the 
power ; 

They shall lie down together, they shall not rise : 
They are extinct, they are quenched as tow. 

18 Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of 

old. 

19 Behold, I do a new thing ; now it shall spring forth ; 
Shall ye not know it ? 

I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. 

20 The beast of the field shall honour me, the wolves and the 

ostriches. 

Because I have given waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the 
desert, 

To give drink to my people, my chosen. 

21 This people have I formed for myself ; they shall show forth my 

praise. 

22 But thou hast not called upon me, O Jacob ; 
But thou hast been weary of me, O Israel. 

23 Thou hast not brought me the sheep of thy burnt offerings ; 
Neither hast thou honoured me with thy sacrifices. 

I have not caused thee to serve with an oblation, 
Nor wearied thee with incense. 

24 Thou hast bought me no sweet cane with money, 



412 



ISAIAH XLIV. 



Neither hast thou filled me with the fat of thy sacrifices : 
But thou hast made me to serve with thy sins, 
Thou hast wearied me with thine iniquities. 

25 I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine 

own sake, 
And will not remember thy sins. 

26 Put me in remembrance : let us plead together : 
State thy case, that thou mayest be justified. 

27 Thy first father hath sinned, and thy teachers have transgressed 

against me. 

28 And I will profane the holy princes, 

And will give Jacob to the curse, and Israel to reproaches. 

XLIV Yet now hear, O Jacob my servant ; and Israel, whom I have 
chosen : 

2 Thus saith the Lord thy maker; and he that formed thee from the 

womb will help thee : 
Fear not, O Jacob, my servant ; and thou, Jesurun, whom I have 
chosen. 

3 For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the 

dry ground : 

I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine 
offspring : 

4 And they shall spring up among the grass, as willows by the 

water courses. 

5 This one shall say, I am the Lord's ; and this one shall call him- 

self by the name of Jacob ; 
And this shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord, 
And surname himself by the name of Israel. 

6 Thus saith the Lord the King of Israel, 
And his Redeemer the Lord of hosts ; 

I am the first, and I am the last ; and beside me there is no God. 

7 And who, as I, will call, and declare it, and state it to me, 
Since I founded the ancient people ? 

And the things that are coming, and shall come, let them show 
unto them. 

8 Fear ye not, neither be afraid : 

Have not I told thee from that time, and declared it ? 
And ye are my witnesses. 

Is there a God beside me ? yea, there is no Rock ; I know not 
any. 

9 They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; 
And their delectable things shall not profit ; 

And they are their own witnesses ; 

10 They see not, nor know ; that they may be ashamed. 

Who hath formed a god, or molten image that is profitable for 
nothing ? 

11 Behold, all his fellows shall be ashamed : 
And the workmen, themselves are but men : 

Let them all be gathered together, let them stand up ; 
Yet they shall fear, and they shall be ashamed together. 



ISAIAH XLIV. 



413 



12 The smith both maketh an axe, and worketh it in the coals, 
And he will fashion it with hammers, and work it with the strength 

of his arms : 

Yea, he is hungry, and is strength faileth : he drinketh no water, 
and is faint. 

13 The carpenter hath stretched out his rule ; he will mark it 
out with an awl ; 

He will form it with chisels, and he will mark it out with the 
compass, 

And he hath made it after the figure of a man, 
According to the beauty of the human form, 
To dwell in a house. 

14 He heweth him down cedars, and taketh a cypress and an oak, 
Which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest: 
He planteth an ash, and the rain will nourish it : 

15 Then shall it be for a man to burn : for he will take thereof, and 

warm himself ; 
Yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread ; 
Yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it ; 
He maketh it a graven image, and faileth down thereto. 

16 He burneth half thereof in the fire ; 

With half thereof he heateth flesh ; he roasteth roast, and is satis- 
fied : 

Yea he will warm himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen 
the fire : 

17 And the residue thereof he hath made a god, even his graven 

image : 

He will fall down unto it, and will worship it, 

And will pray unto it, and say, Deliver me ; for thou art my god. 

18 They have not known, and they will not understand : 
For he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see ; 

And their hearts, that they cannot do wisely. 

19 And none considereth in his heart, i 
Neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, 

I have burned half of it in the fire ; 

Yea, and I have baked bread upon the coals thereof ; 

I have roasted flesh, and eaten it : 

And I will make the residue thereof an abomination, 

I will fall down to the stock of a tree. 

20 He feedeth on ashes : a deceived heart hath turned him aside, 
That he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, 

Is there not a lie in my right hand ? 

21 Remember these things, O Jacob and Israel ; 

For thou art my servant : I have formed thee ; thou art my ser- 
vant : 

O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me. 

22 I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, 
And, as a cloud, thy sins : 

Return unto me ; for I have redeemed thee. 

23 Sing, O ye heavens ; for the Lord hath done it : shout, ye 
lower parts of the earth : 



414 



ISAIAH XLV. 



Break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest, and every tree 
therein : 

For the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and will glorify himself in 
Israel. 

24 Thus saith the Lord, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee 
from the womb, 

I am the Lord that maketh all things ; 

That stretcheth forth the heavens alone ; that spreadeth abroad 
the earth by myself ; 

25 That frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and will make diviners 

mad ; 

That turneth wise men backward, and will make their knowledge 
foolish ; 

26 That confirmeth the word of his servant, and will perform the 

counsel of his messengers ; 
That saith to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be inhabited ; 
And to the cities of Judah, Ye shall be built, 
And I will raise up the ruins thereof : 

27 That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers : 

28 That saith to Coresh, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all 

my pleasure : 
Even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built ; 
And to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid. 

XLV Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, 

To Coresh, whose right hand I have holden, 
To subdue nations before him ; and I will loose the loins of kings ; 
To open before him the two leaved gates ; and the gates shall not 
be shut ; 

2 I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight : 

I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the 
bars of iron : 

3 And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches 

of secret places, 

That thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy 

name, 
Am the God of Israel. 

4 For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, 
Therefore, I will call thee by thy name : 

I will surname thee, though thou hast not known me. 

5 I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside 

me : 

I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me : 

6 That they may know, from the rising of the sun to his going down, 

that there is none beside me. 
I am the Lord, and there is none else. 

7 I form the light, and create darkness : I make peace, and create 

evil : 

I the Lord do all these things. 

8 Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour 
down righteousness: 



ISAIAH XLV. 



415 



Let the earth open, and let salvation and righteousness spring up, 
Let her bring them forth together : 
I the Lord have created it. 

9 Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker ! 

A potsherd of the potsherds of the earth ! 

Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou ? 
Or thy work, He hath no hands? 

10 Woe unto him that saith unto his father, What wilt thou beget ? 
Or to the woman, What wilt thou bring forth ? 

11 Thus saith the LoRD,^the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, 
Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, 

And concerning the work of my hands command ye me. 

12 I have made the earth, and created man upon it : 
I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, 
And all their hosts have I commanded. 

13 I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his 

ways : 

He shall build my city, and he shall let go my captives, not for 

price nor reward, 
Saith the Lord of hosts. 

14 Thus saith the Lord, 

The labour of Egypt, and merchandise of Ethiopia, 
And of the Sabeans, men of stature, 
Shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine : 
They shall come after thee; in chains they shall come over. 
And they shall fall down unto thee, they shall make supplication 
unto thee, 

Saying, Surely God is in thee ; and there is none else, there is no 
God. 

15 Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, 
the Saviour. 

16 They are ashamed, and also confounded, all of them : 
They are gone into confusion together — makers of idols. 

17 But Israel is saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation : 
Ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end. 

18 For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens ; 
God himself that formed the earth and made it ; 

He hath established it, 

He created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited : 
I am the Lord ; and there is none else. 

19 I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth : 
I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain. 

I the Lord speak righteousness, I declare things that are right. 

20 Assemble yourselves and come ; 

Draw near together, ye that are escaped of the nations : 
They have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven 
image, 

And pray unto a god that cannot save. 

21 Tell ye, and bring them near : yea, let them take counsel together : 
Who hath declared this from ancient time ? who hath told it since 

then? 



416 



ISAIAH XLVI. 



Have not I the Lord ? and there is no God else beside me ; 
A just God and a Saviour ; there is none beside me. 

22 Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth : 
For I am God, and there is none else. 

23 I have sworn by myself, 

The word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not 
return, 

That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. 

24 Only in the Lord have I righteousness and strength, shall he say : 
Unto him shall he come; and all that are incensed against him 

shall be ashamed. 

25 In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall 

glory. 

XLVI Bel is bowed down, Nebo stooping, 

Their images are laid upon the beasts, and upon the cattle : 
These, which you carried in processions, 
Are packed up, a burden to the weary beast. 

2 They stoop, they bow down together; they cannot deliver the 

burden, 

But themselves are gone into captivity. 

3 Hearken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the 

house of Israel, 

Which are borne by me from the womb, which are carried from 
the birth : 

4 And to your old age I am he ; and to hoar hairs will I carry you : 
I have made, and I will bear; and I will carry, and will deliver 

you. 

5 To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, 
And compare me, that we may be like ? 

6 They will lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the 

balance. 

They will hire a goldsmith ; and he will make it a god : 
They will fall down, yea, they will worship. 

7 They will bear him upon the shoulder, they will carry him, 
And set him in his place, and he will stand ; 

From his place will he not remove : 

Yea, one shall cry unto him, yet can he not answer, 

Nor save him out of his trouble. 

8 Remember this, and show yourselves men : 
Bring it again to mind, O ye transgressors. 

9 Remember the former things of old : 
For I am God, and there is none else ; 
I am God, and there is none like me, 

10 Declaring the end from the beginning, 

And from ancient times the things that are not yet done, 
Saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure . 

11 Calling an eagle from the east, 

The man of my counsel from a far country : 
Yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass ; 
I have purposed it, I will also do it. 



ISAIAH XLVII. 



417 



12 Hearken unto me, ye stouthearted, that are far from righteousness : 

13 I bring near my righteousness ; it shall not be far off, 
And my salvation shall not tarry :' 

And I will place salvation in Zion for Israel my glory. 

XLVII Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, 
sit on the ground : 
There is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans : 
For thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate. 
2 Take the millstones, and grind meal : 
\ Uncover thy locks, lift up thy skirt, make bare the leg, pass over 
the rivers. 

2 Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen : 
I will take vengeance, and no man shall resist me, 

4 As for our redeemer, the Lord of hosts is his name, the Holy 
One of Israel. 

5 Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the 

Chaldeans : 

For thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms. 

6 I was wroth with my people, I have polluted mine inheritance, 
And given them into thine hand : thou didst show them no mercy ; 
Upon the aged hast thou very heavily laid thy yoke. 

7 And thou saidst, 1 shall be a lady for ever : 

So that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart, 
Neither didst remember the latter end of it. 

8 Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to pleasures, that 

dwellest carelessly, 
That sayest in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me ; 
I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children : 

9 But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, 
The loss of children, and widowhood : 

They have come upon thee in their perfection, 

For the multitude of thy sorceries, . 

And for the great abundance of thine enchantments. 

10 For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness : thou hast said, None 

seeth me. 

Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath seduced thee ; 

And thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me, 

11 Therefore hath evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from 

whence it riseth : 
And mischief shall fall upon thee ; thou shalt not be able to put 
it off: 

And a crash shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not 
know. 

12 Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitudes of 

thy sorceries, 
Wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth ; 
Perhaps thou shalt be able to profit, perhaps thou mayest prevail 

13 Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. 

Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognos- 
ticators, 

E E 



418 



ISAIAH XLVIII. 



Stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon 
thee. 

14 Behold, they are as stubble ; the fire has burned them ; 
They cannot deliver themselves from the power of the flame : 
This is no coal to bake bread with, no fire to sit before. 

15 Thus are they unto thee with whom thou hast laboured ; 
They who have dealt with thee from thy youth, 

They shall wander every one to his quarter ; none shall save thee, 

XLVIII Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the 

name of Israel, 
And are come forth out of the waters of Judah, 
Which swear by the name of the Lord, 
And make mention of God of Israel, 
But not in truth, nor in righteousness. 

2 For they call themselves of the holy city, 
And stay themselves upon the God of Israel ; 
The Lord of hosts is his name. 

3 I have declared the former things from the beginning ; 
And they went forth out of my mouth, and I showed them ; 
I did them suddenly, and they came to pass. 

4 Because I knew that thou art obstinate, 

And thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass ; 

5 Therefore I have declared it to thee from the beginning ; 
Before it come to pass I have showed it thee : 

Lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them, 
And my graven image, and my molten image, hath commanded 
them. 

6 Thou hast heard, see all this ; will not ye too declare something ? 
I have showed thee new things from this time, 

Even hidden things, which thou didst not know. 

7 They are created now, and not from the beginning ; 
And before to-day thou heardest them not ; 

Lest thou shouldest say, Behold, I knew them. 

8 Yea, thou heardest not ; yea, thou knewest not ; 
Yea, of old, thine ear was not opened : 

For I knew that thou wouldest deal very treacherously, 
And wast called a rebel from the womb. 

9 For my name's sake will I defer mine anger, 

And for my praise will I refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off, 

10 Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; 
I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction. 

11 For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: 
For how should my name be polluted? 

And I will not give my glory unto another. 

12 Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel, my called ; 
I am he ; I am the first, I also am the last. 

13 Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, 
And my right hand hath spanned the heavens : 

I call unto them, and they stand up together. 

14 All ye, assemble yourselves, and hear; 



ISAIAH XLIX. 



419 



Which among them hath declared these things ? 

The Lord hath loved him : He will do his pleasure on Babylon, 

And His arm shall be on the Chaldeans. 

15 I, even I, have spoken ; yea, I have called him : 

I have brought him, and he hath prospered in his way. 

16 Come ye near unto me, hear ye this ; 

I have not spoken in secret from the beginning ; 

From the time that it was, there am I : 

And now the Lord God hath sent me, and his spirit. 

17 Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel ; 
I am the Lord thy God, which teacheth thee to profit, 
Which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go. 

18 O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments ! 
Then had thy peace been as a river, 

And thy righteousness as the waves of the sea ; 

19 Thy seed also had been as the sand, 

And the offspring of thy bowels like the gravel thereof : — . 
Yet his name shall not be cut off, nor destroyed from before me. 

20 Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, 
With a voice of shouting declare ye, tell this, 

Utter it even to the end of the earth ; 

Say ye, The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob. 

21 And they thirsted not when he led them through the deserts : 
He caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them : 

He clave the rock also, and the waters gushed out. 

22 There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked. 

XLIX Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye nations, from far; 

The Lord hath called me from the womb ; 

From the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. 

2 And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword ; 
In the shadow of his hand hath he hid me, 

And made me a polished shaft ; in his quiver hath he hid me ; 

3 And he will say unto me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, 
In whom I will be glorified. 

4 And I said, I have laboured in vain, 

I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain : 
Yet surely my right is with the Lord, 
And my work with my God. 

5 And now, saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be 

his servant, 
To bring Jacob again to him, 

Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes 

of the Lord, 
And my God shall be my strength. 

6 And He will say, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my 

servant 

To raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of 
Israel : 

E E 2 



420 



ISAIAH XLIX. 



I have also given thee for a light to the Gentiles, 

That thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. 

7 Thus saith the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One ; 
To him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, 

to a servant of rulers, 
Kings shall see and arise, and princes shall bow themselves, 
Because of the Lord that is faithful, 
The Holy One of Israel, who shall choose thee. 

8 Thus saith the Lord, 

In a time of favour have I heard thee, 
And in a day of salvation have I helped thee : 
And I will preserve thee, and give thee for a covenant of the 
people, 

To establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages ; 

9 To say to the prisoners, Go forth ; 

To them that are in darkness, Show yourselves. 
They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be on all bare 
hills. 

10 They shall not hunger nor thirst ; neither shall the mirage nor sun 

smite them : 

For he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, 
Even by the springs of water shall he guide them. 

11 And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall 

be raised. 

12 Behold, these shall come from far : 

And, lo, these from the north and from the west ; 
And these from the land of Sinim. 

13 Shout, O heavens ; and be joyful, O earth ; 
Let the mountains break into a shout : 

For the Lord hath comforted his people, 
And will have mercy upon his afflicted. 

14 But Zion will say, The Lord hath forsaken me, 
And my Lord hath forgotten me. 

15 Can a woman forget her sucking child, 

That she should not have compassion on the son of her womb ? 
Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. 

16 Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands ; 
Thy walls are continually before me. 

17 Thy children have made haste ; 

t Thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of 
thee. 

18 Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold : 

All of them are gathered together, they are come to thee. 
As I live, saith the Lord, 

Thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, 
And bind them on thee, as a bride doeth. 

19 For thy wastes, and thy ruins, and thy desolate land, 
Shall even now be too narrow for the inhabitants, 
And they that swallowed thee up shall be far away. 

20 The children of thee, the bereaved one, 



tSAIAH L. 



421 



Shall say again in thine ears, The place is too strait for me : 
Make room for me that I may dwell. 

21 Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath borne me these, 
For I was bereaved and barren ; 

A captive, and an exile, ami who hath brought up these? 
Behold, I was left alone ; these, where were they ? 

22 Thus saith the Lord God, 

Behold, I will lift up my hand to the nations, 
And set up my standard to the peoples: 
And they shall bring thy sons in their arms, 
And thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders. 
l 2S And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, 
And their queens thy nursing mothers : 
They shall bow down to thee with their face to the earth, 
And lick the dust of thy feet ; 
And thou shalt know that I am the Lord, 
Whom they that wait for shall not be ashamed. 

24 Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive 
delivered ? 

25 But thus saith the Lord, 

Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, 
And the prey of the terrible shall be delivered : 
For I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, 
And I will save thy children. 
2G And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh ; 

And they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with new 
wine : 

And all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy Saviour, 
And thy Redeemer is the Mighty One of Jacob. 

L Thus saith the Lord, 

Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have 
put away ? 

Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you ? 
Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, 
And for your transgressions is your mother put away. 

2 Wherefore, when I came, was there no man ? 
When I called, was there none to answer ? 

Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem ? 

And have I no power to deliver ? 

Behold, by my rebuke I will dry up the sea, 

I will make the rivers a wilderness ; 

Their fish shall rot, because there is no water, and die for thirst ; 

3 I will clothe the heavens with blackness, 
And I will make sackcloth their covering. 

4 The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the scholar, 
That I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is 

weary : 

He will waken me morning by morning, 

He will waken mine ear to hear as the scholar. 

5 The Lord God hath opened mine ear, 



422 



ISAIAH LI. 



And I did not resist, neither turned away back, 
c I gave my back to the smiters, 

And my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair : 
I hid not my face from shame and spitting. 

7 For the Lord God will help me ; therefore I am not confounded : 
Therefore have I set my face like a flint, 

And 1 know that I shall not be ashamed. 

8 My justifier is near ; 

Who will contend with me ? let us stand up together : 
Who is mine adversary ? let him come near to me. 

9 Behold, the Lord God will help me ; who is he that shall condemn 

me ? 

Lo, they all shall wax old as a garment ; the moth shall eat them up. 

10 Who is among you that feareth the Lord, 
That obeyeth the voice of his servant, 

That w r alketh in darkness, and hath no light? 

Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God. 

11 Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about 

with sparks : 

Walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have 
kindled. 

This shall ye have of mine hand ; ye shall lie down in sorrow. 

LI Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, 

Ye that seek the Lord : 
Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, 
And to the hole of the quarry whence ye are digged. 

2 Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you : 
For I called him alone, and I will bless him, and cause him to in- 
crease. 

3 For the Lord hath comforted Zion : he hath comforted all her 

waste places ; 

And he hath made her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like 

the garden of the Lord ; 
Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the 

voice of melody. 

4 Hearken unto me, my people ; 
And give ear unto me, O my nation : 
For a law shall go forth from me, 

And I will establish my judgment for a light of the nations. 

5 My righteous is near ; my salvation is gone forth ; 
And mine arms shall judge the nations: 

The isles shall wait upon me, and in mine arm shall they trust. 

6 Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth 
beneath : 

For the heavens are driven away like smoke, and the earth shall 

wax old like a garment, 
And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner : 
But my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not 

be abolished. 



ISAIAH LI. 



423 



7 Hearken unto me, ye that know righteousness, 
The people in whose heart is my law ; 

Fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their 
revilings. 

8 For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm 

shall eat them like wool : 
But my righteousness shall be for ever, and my salvation from 
generation to generation. 

9 Awake ! awake ! put on strength, O arm of the Lord ; 
Awake I as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. 

Art thou not the same that hewed Rahab in pieces, that wounded 
the dragon ? 

10 Art thou not the same which dried the sea, the waters of the great 

deep ; 

That made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass 
over ? 

11 Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, 
And come with shouting unto Zion; 

And everlasting joy shall be upon their head : 
Gladness and joy shall overtake them : sorrow and mourning have 
fled away. 

12 I am He that comforteth you : 

Who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall 
die, 

And of the son of man which shall be made as grass ; 

13 And hast forgotten the Lord thy Maker, 

That stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundations of 
the earth ; 

And hast feared continually every day, because of the fury of the 

oppressor, 
As he made ready to destroy : 
And where is the fury of the oppressor ? 

14 The captive exile hasteneth that he may be loosed, 

And he shall not die in the dungeon, and his bread shall not 
fail. 

15 For I am the Lord thy God, that rouseth the sea, and its waves 

roar : 

The Lord of hosts is his name. 

16 And I have put my words in thy mouth, 

And I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand, 

To plant the heavens, and to lay the foundations of the earth, 

And to say unto Zion, Thou art my people. 

17 Awake ! awake I stand up, O Jerusalem, 

Which has drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his 
wrath : 

Thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung 
them out. 

is There is none to guide her among all the sons whom she hath 
brought forth ; 

E E 4 



424 



ISAIAH LI I. 



Neither is there any that taketh her by the hand 
Of all the sons that she hath brought up. 
19 These two things are befalling thee; who shall be sorry for 
thee? 

Desolation, and ruin, and the famine, and the sword : 
By whom shall I comfort thee ? 
£0 Thy sons have fainted, they lie at the head of all the streets, as a 
wild bull in a net : 
They are full of the wrath of the Lord, the rebuke of thy God. 

21 Therefore hear now this, thou afflicted, and drunken, but not 
with wine: 

22 Thus saith thy Lord the Lord, and thy God that pleadeth the 

cause of his people, 
Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, 
The dregs of the cup of my wrath ; 
Thou shalt no more drink it again : 

23 But I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee ; 
Which have said to thy soul, Bow down, that we may go over : 
And thou hast laid thy back as the ground, 

And as the street, to them that went over. 

LII Awake ! awake ! put on thy strength, O Zion ; 

Put on thy garments of beauty, O Jerusalem, the holy city : 
For henceforth there shall no more come into thee 
The uncircumcised and the unclean. 

2 Shake thyself from the dust ; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem : 
Loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of 

Zion : 

3 For thus saith the Lord, 

Ye have sold yourselves for nought : and ye shall be redeemed 
without money. 

4 For thus saith the Lord God, 

My people went down aforetime into Egypt to sojourn there ; 
And the Assyrian oppressed them without cause. 

5 Now therefore, what have 1 here, saith the Lord, 
That my people is taken away for nought ? 
Their oppressors exult, saith the Lord ; 

And my name continually every day is blasphemed. 

6 Therefore my people shall know my name : 
Therefore they shall know in that day, 
That I am he that said. Behold, I am here. 

7 How timely upon the mountains 

Are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, publishing peace, 
Bringing good tidings of good, publishing salvation, 
Saying unto Zion, Thy God reigneth. 

The voice of thy watchmen ! They have lifted up the voice ; 

8 With the voice together shall they shout : 

For they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord returneth to Zion. 
Break forth into joy, shout together, ye waste places of Jerusalem: 

9 For the Lord hath comforted his people, 
He hath redeemed Jerusalem, 



ISAIAH LI 1 1. 



425 



10 The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the 

nations ; 

And all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our 
God. 

11 Depart ye ! depart ye ! go ye out from thence, touch no un- 
' clean thing ; 

Go ye out of the midst of her ; be ye clean, ye armour-bearers of 
the Lord. 

12 For ye shall not go out with haste, nor depart in flight : 

For the Lord doth go before you; and the God of Israel brings 
up your rear. 

13 Behold, my servant shall do wisely, 

He shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. 

14 As many were astonished at thee ; 

L (His visage was so marred more than any man, 
And his form more than the sons of men :) 

15 So shall he sprinkle many nations ; 
Kings shall shut their mouths before him : 

For that which had not been told them have they seen ; 
And that which they had not heard have they perceived. 

LIII Who hath believed our report ? 

And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed ? 

2 For he shall grow up before him like a tender plant, 
And as a root out of a dry ground : 

He hath no form nor comeliness ; and when we shall see him, 
There is no beauty that we should desire him. 

3 He is despised and rejected of men ; 

A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief : 
And we hid as it were our faces from him ; 
He was despised, and we esteemed him not. 

4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows : 
Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. 

5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, 
He was bruised for our iniquities : 

The chastisement of our peace was upon him ; 
And with his stripes we are healed. 

6 All we like sheep have gone astray ; 

We have turned every one to his own way ; 

And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. 

7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, 
Yet he opened not his mouth : 

As a lamb is brought to the slaughter, 
And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, 
So he opened not his mouth. 

8 He was taken from prison and from judgment : 
And who among his generation will consider 
That he was cut off, out of the land of the living, 

For the transgression of my people : — stricken for them. 

9 And he made his grave with the wicked, 



426 



TSAIAH LIV. 



And with the rich in his death ; 
Although he had done no violence, 
Neither was any deceit in his mouth. 

10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him ; he hath put him to grief: 
When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, 

He shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, 

And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 

11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied : 
By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; 
For he shall bear their iniquities. 

12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the many, 
And he shall divide the spoil with the strong ; 
Because he hath poured out his soul unto death: 
And he was numbered with the transgressors, 

And he bare the sin of many ; 

And he will make intercession for the transgressors. 

LIV Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear ; 

Break forth into singing, and cry aloud, 
Thou that didst not travail with child : 
For more are the children of the desolate 
Than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. 

2 Enlarge the place of thy tent, 

And let them stretch forth the curtains of thy dwellings : 
Spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes ; 

3 For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left; 
And thy seed shall inherit the nations, and repeople the desolate 

cities. 

4 Fear not ; for thou shalt not be ashamed : 
Neither be thou abashed ; for thou shalt not blush : 
For thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, 

And shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any 
more. 

5 For thy Maker is thine husband ; the Lord of hosts is his 

name ; 

And the Holy One of Israel thy redeemer ; 
The God of the whole earth shall he be called. 

6 For the Lord hath recalled thee, as a wife forsaken and grieved 

in spirit, 

And as a wife of youth, of whom thy God said, She shall be put 
away. 

7 For a small moment I forsook thee ; 

But with great mercies will I draw thee back again. 

8 In a gush of wrath, I hid my face from thee for a moment ; 
But with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, 
Saith the Lord thy Redeemer. 

9 For this is as the waters of Noah unto me : 

For as I sware that the waters of Noah should no more go over 
the earth ; 

So have I sworn that I will not be wroth with thee, and that I will 
not rebuke thee. 



ISAIAH LV. 



427 



10 For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be overthrown, 
But my kindness shall not depart from thee, 

Neither shall the covenant of my peace be overthrown, 
Saith the Lord that pitieth thee. 

11 O thou afflicted, tempest-tossed, uncomforted ! 
Behold I lay thy stones in cement of vermillion, 
And will found thee upon sapphires : 

12 And I will make thy battlements of rubies, 
And thy gates of carbuncles, 

And all thy borders of precious stones. 

13 And all thy children shall be disciples of the Lord ; 
And great shall be the peace of thy children. 

14 In righteousness shalt thou be established : 

Thou shalt be far from oppression, for thou shalt not fear : 
And from destruction, for it shall not come near thee. 

15 Behold, they shall gather, they shall gather, but not at my 

signal : 

Whoso hath gathered against thee shall fall away to thy side. 

16 Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the fire of coal, 
And bringeth forth a weapon for its work ; 

And I have created the waster to destroy. 

17 No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; 

And against every tongue that shall stand with thee in judgment, 

thou shalt obtain thy cause. 
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, 
And their justification from me: — 
The Lord hath said it. 

LV Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, 

And he that hath no money ; come ye, buy, and eat ; 
Yea, come, buy wine and milk, without money, and without price. 

2 Wherefore will ye spend money for that which is not bread ? 
And your labour for that which satisfieth not ? 

Hearken, hearken unto me, and eat ye that which is good, 
And your soul shall delight itself in fatness. 

3 Incline your ear, and come unto me : hear, and your soul shall 

live ; 

And I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure 
mercies of David. 

4 Behold, I have given him for a witness to the peoples, 
A leader and commander to the peoples. 

5 Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not; 
And nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee, 
Because of the Lord thy God, 

And for the Holy one of Israel ; for he hath glorified thee. 

6 Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, 
Call ye upon him while he is near : 

7 Let the wicked forsake his way, 
And the evil man his thoughts : 

And let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon 
him; 



428 



ISAIAH LVI. 



And to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. 

8 For niy thoughts are not your thoughts, 
Neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. 

9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, 
So are my ways higher than your ways, 
And my thoughts than your thoughts. 

10 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and 
returneth not thither, 
Till it hath watered the earth, and made it bring forth and bud, 
And hath given seed to the sower, and bread to the eater : 
So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth : 
It shall not return unto me void, 
Nor till it hath done that which I desired, 
And hath accomplished that whereto I sent it. 

12 For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace : 

The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into 
shouts, 

And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 

13 Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress, 
And instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle : 
And it shall be to the Lord for a name, 

For an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. 

LVI Thus saith the Lord, keep ye justice, and do righteousness : 

For my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be 
revealed. 

2 Blessed is the man that shall do this, and the son of man that shall 

lay hold on it ; 
Keeping the sabbath from profaning it, 
And keeping his hand from doing any evil. 

3 And let not the foreigner that hath joined himself to the Lord, 
speak, 

Saying, The Lord will utterly separate me from his people : 
Neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree. 

4 For thus saith the Lord unto the eunuchs that shall keep my 

sabbaths, 

And choose the things that please me, and take hold of my 
covenant ; 

5 Even unto them will I give in mine house, and within my walls, 
A place and a name better than of sons and of daughters : 

I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off. 

6 Also the foreigners, that join themselves to the Lord, 

To serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his 
servants, 

Every one that keepeth the sabbath from profaning it, and taketh 
hold of my covenant : 

7 Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, 
And make them joyful in my house of prayer : 

Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon 
mine altar ; 

For mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all peoples. 



ISAIAH LVII. 



429 



8 This is the word of the Lord God, the gatherer of the outcasts 
of Israel : — 

Yet will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered. 

9 All ye beasts of the field, come to devour, 
Yea, all ye beasts in the forest. 

10 His watchmen are all blind, they know not the danger ; 
They are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark — 
Dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber : 

11 And the dogs are greedy, they know not how to be satisfied, 
And they, the shepherds, know not how to discern : 

They are all of them turned to their own way, every one of them 
to his own gain. 

12 Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves 

with strong drink ; 
And to-morrow shall be as to-day, and much more abundant. 

LVII The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart : 

And merciful men are taken away, none considering 
That the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. 

2 He shall enter into peace : — 

They shall rest in their beds — Each one that walketh in his up- 
rightness. 

3 But ye — draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, 
The seed of the adulterer and the harlot : 

4 Against whom do ye sport yourselves ? 

Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and put out the tongue ? 
Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood, 

5 Burning with lust for idols under every green tree, 

Slaying the children in the valleys under the cliffs of the rocks? 

6 Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion ; they, they 

are thy lot : 

Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering, thou hast offered 

a meat offering. 
Should I rest satisfied with these things? 

7 Upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set thy bed : 
Even thither wentest thou up to offer sacrifice. 

8 And behind the door and the door-post hast thou placed thy 

memorial : 

For thou hast discovered thyself to another than me, and art 
gone up; 

Thou hast enlarged thy bed, and made thee a covenant with them ; 
Thou hast loved their bed, thou hast provided room. 

9 And thou wentest to the king with oil, and didst multiply thy 

perfumes, 

And didst send thy messengers far off, and didst debase thyself 
even unto hell. 
10 Thou art wearied in the length of thy way ; 
Yet saidst thou not, There is no hope : 
Thou hast yet found life in thine hand ; 
Therefore thou art not disheartened. 



480 



ISAIAH LVIII. 



11 And of whom hast thou been afraid or feared, that thou hast lied, 
And hast not remembered me, nor laid it to thy heart? 

Is it not because I hold my peace, and that of old, that thou wilt 
not fear me ? 

12 I will declare thy righteousness, and thy works ; and they shall not 

avail thee. 

13 When thou criest, let thy assemblage of idols deliver thee ; 

But the wind shall carry them all away ; a breath shall take them 
off: 

But he that putteth his trust in me shall possess the land. 
And shall inherit my holy mountain : — 

14 And He shall say, Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, 
Take up the stumblingblock out of the way of my people. 

15 For thus saich the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, 
Whose name is Holy ; 

I dwell in the high and holy place, 
With him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, 
To revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the 
contrite ones. 

16 For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth : 
For the spirit should fail before me, and the souls which I have 

made. 

17 For the iniquity of his covetousness am I wroth, and will smite 

him : 

I will hide me, and will be wroth, 

For he has gone on frowardly in the way of his heart. 

18 I have seen his ways, and I will heal him, 

And I will lead him, and restore comforts unto him and to his 
mourners : 

19 I create the fruit of the lips ; Peace, peace to him that is far off, 
And to him that is near, 

And I will heal him ; saith the Lord. 

20 But the wicked are like the troubled sea, for it cannot rest, 
And its waters cast up mire and dirt. 

21 There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked. 

LVIII Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, 

And show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob 
their sins. 

2 Yet they will seek me daily, and delight to know my ways, 

As a nation that has done righteousness, and has not forsaken the 
ordinance of their God : 

They will ask of me the ordinances of justice : they will take de- 
light in approaching to God. 

3 Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou hast not seen? 
Wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou wilt take no 

knowledge? 

Behold, in the day of your fast, ye find pleasure, 
And exact all your labours. 

4 Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fiit of 

wickedness : 



ISAIAH LIX. 



431 



Ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard 
on high. 

5 Shall it be like this, the fast that I will choose, the day of man's 

humbling himself? 
Is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth 

and ashes under him? 
Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord ? 

6 Is not this the fast that I will choose — 

To loose the tight cords of wickedness, to undo the bonds of the 
yoke, 

And to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke ? 

7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, 

fAnd that thou bring the wandering poor to thy house? 
When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him ; 
And that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? 

8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, 
And thine health shall spring forth speedily : 

And thy righteousness shall go before thee ; 
The glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward. 

9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer ; 
Thou shalt cry, and He shall say, Here I am. 

If thou wilt take away from the midst of thee the yoke, 
The putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity ; 

10 And wilt draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted 

soul : 

Then shall thy light rise in the darkness, and thy thick darkness 
be as the noon day : 

11 And the Lord shall guide thee continually, 

And satisfy thy soul in drought, and make strong thy bones : 
And thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of 
water, 

Whose waters shall not fail. 

12 And they that come of thee shall build the old waste places : 
Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; 
And thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, 

The restorer of paths, that men may dwell there. 

13 If thou wilt turn away thy foot from the sabbath, 
From doing thy pleasure on my holy day ; 

And wilt call the sabbath a delight, and the Lord's holy day 
honourable ; 

And wilt honour him, not doing thine own ways, 
2 Nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words : 

14 Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord ; 

And I will make thee ride upon the high places of the earth, 
And feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father : 
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 

LIX Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save ; 
Neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: 

But your iniquities have been separating between you and your 
God, 



432 ISAIAH LIX. 

And your sins have hid his face from you, that He doth not hear. 

3 For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with 

iniquity ; 

Your lips have spoken lies, your tongue will utter perverseness. 

4 None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth in truth: 
They trust in vanity, and speak lies ; 

They conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. 

5 They have hatched cockatrice' eggs, and will weave the spider's 

web : 

He that eateth of their eggs shall die, and the crushed egg shall 
hatch into a viper; 

6 Their webs shall not become garments, 

Neither shall they cover themselves with their works : 
Their works are works of iniquity, and the doing of violence is in 
their hands. 

7 Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood : 
Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction 

are in their paths. 

8 The way of peace they know not ; and there is no justice in their 

goings : 

They have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein 
shall not know peace. 

9 Therefore is justice far from us, neither will righteousness over- 

take us : 

We wait for light, but behold darkness ; for brightness, but we 
walk in thick darkness. 

10 We grope for the wall like the blind, and like the eyeless we grope. 
We stumble at noon day as in the night ; we are in desolate places, 

as dead men. 

11 We groan all like bears, and mourn sore like doves: 

We look for judgment, but there is none ; for salvation, but it is 
far off from us. 

12 For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins 

testify against us : 
For our transgressions are with us ; and our iniquities, we know 
them : — 

13 In transgressing and lying against the Lord, and turning away 

backward from our God, 
Speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the 
heart words of falsehood. 

14 And judgment is turned away backward, and justice will stand 

aloof: 

For truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter: 

15 Yea, truth was found wanting ; and he that departed from evil 

made himself a prey. 
And the Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no 
judgment : 

16 And He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was 

none to interpose : 
Therefore His own arm brought salvation unto him ; and His righ- 
teousness, it sustained him. 



ISAIAH LX. 



433 



17 And He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of 

salvation upon his head ; 
And He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and 
was clad with zeal as a cloak. 

18 According to their deeds, accordingly He will repay, 
Wrath to his adversaries, to his enemies their deserts : 
To the islands he will repay their deserts. 

19 And they shall fear the name of the Lord from the west, 
And his glory from the rising of the sun. 

For it shall come like a flood of war, 

The spirit of the Lord lifting up a standard therein. 

20 Then a redeemer shall come for Zion, 

And for them that turn from transgression in Jacob : 
The Lord hath said it. 

21 As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord ; 

My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy 
mouth, 

Shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy 
seed, 

Nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the Lord, from 
henceforth, and for ever. 

LX Arise I Be light ! For thy light is come, 

And the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. 
For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness 
the peoples : 

But the Lord shall rise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen 
upon thee. 

3 And nations shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of 

thy rising. 

4 Lift up thine eyes round about, and see ; 

All they gather themselves together, they come to thee : 
Thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed 
at thy side. 

5 Then thou shalt see and brighten up, and thine heart shall throb 

and swell ; 

Because the abundance of the sea shall be poured in upon thee, 
The forces of the nations shall come unto thee. 

6 A stream of camels shall cover thee, dromedaries of Midian and 

Ephah : 

All they from Sheba shall come, they shall bring gold and incense ; 
And they shall show forth the praises of the Lord with joy. 

7 All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered for thee, 
The rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee : 
They shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, 
And I will glorify my house of glory. 

8 Who are these t .'sat fly as a cloud, and as doves to their 
windows ? 

9 Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, 
To bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, 
For the name of the Lord thy God, 

F F 



434 



ISAIAH LX. 



And for the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee. 

10 And the sons of the stranger shall build up thy walls, 
And their kings shall minister unto thee : 

For in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy 
on thee. 

11 And thy gates shall be open continually ; they shall not be shut 

day nor night ; 
To bring unto thee the forces of the nations, 
And their kings led in triumph. 

12 For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish ; 
Yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted. 

13 The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, 
The cypress, the pine tree, and the box together, 
To beautify the place of my sanctuary ; 

And I will make the place of my feet glorious. 

1 4 And the sons of the oppressors shall come bending unto thee ; 
And all they that despised thee shall bow down to the soles of thy 

feet; 

And they shall call thee, The City of the Lord, The Zion of the 
Holy One of Israel. 

15 Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went 

through thee, 

I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations. 

16 And thou shalt suck the milk of nations, and shalt suck the breast 

of kings : 

And thou shalt know that I the Lord am thy saviour, 
And the mighty One of Jacob thy redeemer. 

17 For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, 
And for wood brass, and for stones iron ; 

And I will make thy government peace, and thy rulers righteous- 
ness. 

18 Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, 
Wasting nor destruction within thy borders ; 

But thou shalt call thy walls, Salvation, and thy gates, Praise. 

19 The sun shall be no more thy light by day ; 
Neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee : 

But the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God 
thy glory. 

20 Thy sun shall no more go down ; neither shall thy moon withdraw 

itself: 

For the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy 
mourning shall be ended. 

21 And the people shall be all righteous : they shall inherit the land 

for ever, 

The branch of my planting, the work of my hands, to glorify 
myself. 

22 A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong 

nation : 

I the Lord will hasten it in its time. 



ISAIAH LXII. 



435 



LXI The Spirit of the Lord Gop is upon me ; 

Because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto 
the meek ; 

He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, 
To proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the eyes 
to them that are bound ; 

2 To proclaim a year of grace for the Lord, and day of vengeance 

for our God ; 

3 To comfort all that mourn ; to appoint unto them that mourning 

Zion, 

To give them a diadem for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, 
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness ; 
And they shall be called, Oaks of righteousness, 
The planting of the Lord, to glorify himself. 

4 And they shall build the old wastes, 
They shall raise up the former desolations, 
And they shall repair the waste cities, 
The desolations of many generations. 

5 And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, 

And the sons of the alien shall be your ploughmen and your vine- 
dressers. 

6 And ye, ye shall be named, The priests of the Lord : 
Men shall call you, The ministers of our God : 

Ye shall eat the riches of the nations, 

And in their glory shall ye boast yourselves. 

7 For your shame ye shall have double ; 

And for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion : 
Therefore in their land they shall possess the double : 
Everlasting joy shall be unto them. 

8 For I am the Lord, loving justice, hating robbery, 

And I will give their hire truly, and I will make an everlasting 
covenant with them. 

9 And their seed shall be known among the nations, and their off- 

spring among the peoples : 
All that see them shall acknowledge them, 
That they are a seed which the Lord hath blessed. 

10 I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, 
My soul shall be joyful in my God ; 

For he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, 
He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, 
As a bridegroom adjusteth his priestly turban, 
And as a bride arrayeth her jewels. 

11 For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, 

And as the garden causeth its plant to spring forth ; 
So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring 
forth before all the nations. 

LXII For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, 

And for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, 
Until the righteousness thereof go forth as a shining light, 
And the salvation thereof as a lamp that burnetii ; 

FT 2 



436 



ISAIAH LXIII. 



2 And the nations shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy 

glory : 

And thou shalt be called by a new name, 
Which the mouth of the Lord shall name. 

3 And thou shalt be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, 
And a royal diadem in the hand of thy God. 

4 Thou shalt no more be called, Forsaken ; 
Neither shall thy land any more be called, Desolate : 
But thou shalt be named, My own Delight; 

And thy land, the Married One. 

For the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. 

5 For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry 

thee : 

And as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God 
rejoice over thee. 

6 I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, 
Which shall never hold their peace day nor night : 

7 Ye remembrancers of the Lord, keep not silence, and give him 

no rest, 

Till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. 

8 The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by his arm of 
strength, 

Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies ; 
And the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which 
thou hast laboured : 

9 But they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord ; 
And they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts 

of my holiness. 

10 Go through, go through the gates ; prepare ye the way of the 
people ; 

Cast up, cast up the highway ; gather out the stones ; 
Lift up a standard for the peoples. 

11 Behold the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, 
Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh ; 
Behold, his reward is with him, and his hire before him. 

12 And they shall call them, The holy people, The redeemed of the 

Lord : 

And thou shalt be called, Sought out, A city not forsaken. 

LXIII Who is this that cometh from Edom? with bright dyed 

garments from Bozrah ? 
This that is glorious in his apparel, advancing in the greatness of 
his strength ? 

I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save. 

2 Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, 

And thy garments like him that treadeth in the winepress ? 

3 I have trodden the winepress alone ; 

And of the peoples there was not a man with me : 
And I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my 
fury ; 



ISAIAH LXIII. 



437 



And their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I have 

stained all my raiment. 
For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my 

redeemed is come. 
And I look, but there is none to help ; and wonder, but there is 

none to uphold : 

And mine own arm hath brought salvation unto me ; and my fury, 
it upholds me. 

And I will tread down the peoples in mine anger, and make them 

drunk in my fury, 
And I will bring down their strength to the earth. 

I will mention the lovingkindness of the Lord, and the 
praises of the Lord, 
According to all that the Lord hath bestowed on us, 
And the great goodness toward the house of Israel, 
Which he hath bestowed on them according to his mercies, 
And according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses. 

For he said, They only are my people, children that will not lie : 
And he became their Saviour. 

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence 
saved them : 

In his love and in his pity He himself redeemed them ; 
And he bare them, and carried them all the days of old. 

But they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit ; 
Therefore he was turned to be their enemy, 
He himself fought against them. 

Then he remembered the days of old, Moses, and his people, 
saying, 

Where is he that brought them up out of the sea 

With the shepherd of his flock ? 

Where is he that put his holy Spirit within him ? 

That led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm, 

Dividing the water before them, to make him an everlasting name ? 

Leading them through the deep, — as an horse in the desert, they 

shall not stumble : 
As cattle go down into the valley, the spirit of the Lord shall make 

them to rest : 

So didst thou lead thy people, to make thyself a glorious name. 

Look down from heaven, 
And behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory : 
Where are thy zeal and thy mighty deeds, 
The yearning of thy heart and of thy soul toward me ? 
Are they restrained ? 
For Thou art our father, 

Though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us 
not : 

Thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer ; thy Name is from 
everlasting. 

O Lord, why wilt thou make us to wander from thy ways, 
And harden our hearts from thy fear ? 



438 



ISAIAH LXV. 



Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of thine inheritance. 

18 Our enemies have possessed the people of thy holiness for a little 

while ; 

They have trodden down thy sanctuary. 

19 We are thine of old : thou wast not their king, they were not called 

by thy name. 

LXIV Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest 

come down, 

That the mountains might quake at thy presence, 

2 As fire burneth stubble, as fire boileth water, 
To make thy name known to thine enemies, 
That the nations may tremble at thy presence ! 

3 In doing terrible things which we look not for, 
Oh that thou wouldest come down, 

That the mountains might quake at thy presence. 

4 For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, 
Nor perceived by the ear, 

Neither hath the eye seen, a God beside thee, 

Who will do such things for him that waiteth for him. 

5 Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, 
Those that remember thee in thy ways : 

Behold, thou art wroth ; for we have sinned : 
Thy ways are everlasting, and we shall be saved. 

6 But we were all as an unclean thing, 
And all our righteousnesses as filthy rags ; 

And we all did fade as a leaf ; and our iniquities like the wind will 

take us away. 
And there is none that calleth upon thy name, 
That stirreth up himself to take hold of thee : 
For thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because 

of our iniquities. 

8 But now, O Lord, thou art our father ; 
We are the clay, and thou our potter ; 
And we all are the work of thy hand. 

9 Be not wroth very sore, O Lord, neither remember iniquity for 

ever : 

Behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people. 

10 Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem 

a desolation. 

11 Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, 
Is burned up with fire : and all our pleasant things are laid waste. 

12 Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O Lord ? 
Wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore ? 

LXV I have answered them that asked not for me ; 

I am found of them that sought me not : 

I said, Behold me, behold me, unto a nation that was not called 
by my name. 

2 I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, 
Which walk in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts ; 



ISAIAH LXV. 



3 A people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face ; 
Which sacrifice in gardens, and burn incense upon altars of brick ; 

4 Which sit among the graves, and lodge in the monuments ; 
Which eat swine's flesh, and with broth of abominable things in 

their vessels ; 

5 Which say Keep to thyself, come not near to me ; for I am holier 

than thou. 

These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burneth all the day. 

6 Behold, it is written before me : 

I will not keep silence, till I have recompensed, even recompensed 
into their bosom, 

7 Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together, saith 

the Lord : 

For they have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed 

me upon the hills : 
And I will measure their former work into their bosom. 

8 Thus saith the Lord, 

As the new wine is found in a cluster, and one saith, 
Destroy it not ; for a blessing is in it : 

So will I do for my servant's sakes, not to destroy the whole. 

9 And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, 
And out of Judah an inheritor of my mountains : 

And mine elect shall inherit it, and my servants shall dwell there. 

10 And Sharon shall be a fold of flocks, 

And the valley of Achor a place for the herds to lie down in, 
For my people that have sought me. 

11 But ye that have forsaken the Lord, that forget my holy 
mountain, 

That prepare a table for Fortune, 

And that fill a drink offering unto Destiny, 

12 I have destined you to the sword, and ye shall all bow down to 

the slaughter : 

Because when I called, ye did not answer ; when I spake, ye did 
not hear ; 

But did evil before mine eyes,, and did choose that wherein I 
delighted not. 

13 Therefore thus saith the Lord God, 

Behold, my servants shall eat, but ye shall be hungry : 
Behold, my servants shall drink, but ye shall be thirsty : 
Behold, my servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be ashamed : 

14 Behold, my servants shall sing for joy of heart, 
But ye shall cry for sorrow of heart, 

And shall howl for anguish of spirit. 

15 And ye shall leave your name for a curse unto my chosen : 

And the Lord God shall slay thee, and call his servants by another 
name : 

16 By which he who blesseth himself in the earth, shall bless himself 

in the God of truth ; 
And he that sweareth in the earth by it, shall swear by the God 
of truth ; 



440 



ISAIAH LXVI. 



Because the former troubles are forgotten, 
And because they are hid from mine eyes. 

17 For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth : 
And the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. 

18 But be ye glad, and rejoice for ever, in that which I create : 
For, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. 

19 And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people : 

And the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the 
voice of crying. 

20 No more shall the sucking babe be carried thence to burial, 
Nor an old man that hath not filled his days : 

For the child shall die an hundred years old ; 
And the sinner dying an hundred years old shall be deemed 
accursed. 

21 And they shall build houses, and inhabit them ; 

And they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. 

22 They shall not build, and another inhabit ; they shall not plant, and 

another eat : 

For as the days of a tree shall be the days of my people, 
And my chosen shall wear out the work of their hands. 

23 They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth trouble : 

For they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring 
with them. 

24 And it shall come to pass, 

That before they call, I will answer ; and while they are yet speak- 
ing I will hear. 

25 The wolf and the little lamb shall feed as one, and the lion shall 

eat straw like the bullock : 
And dust shall be the serpent's meat. 

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith 
the Lord. 

LXVI Thus saith the Lord, 

The heavens are my throne, and the earth is my footstool : 
Where is the house that ye will build unto me ? 
And where is the place of my rest ? 

2 For all those things did mine hand make, 
And they all were, saith the Lord : 
But to this man will I have regard, 

To the poor and contrite in spirit, 

And who tremblingly reveres my word. 

3 Slaying an ox, killing a man ; 
Sacrificing a lamb, breaking a dog's neck ; 
Offering an oblation, offering swine's blood ; 
Burning incense, blessing an idol: 

Yea, they have chosen their own ways., 

And their soul delighteth in their abominations. 

4 I also will choose their vexations, and will bring their fears upon 

them ; 

Because when I called, none did answer ; when I spake, they did 
not hear ; 



ISAIAH LXVI. 



441 



But they did' evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I 
delighted not. 

5 Hear the word of the Lord, ye that tremblingly revere his 
word ; 

Your brethren that hate you, and cast you out for my name's sake, 
have said, 

The Lord shall be glorified, and we shall see your joy : — 
But they shall be ashamed. 

6 A voice of tumult from the city, a voice from the temple, 
A voice of the Lord, rendering recompence to his enemies. 

7 Before she travailed, she brought forth ; 

Before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. 

8 Who hath heard such a thing ? who hath seen such things ? 
Shall a country be brought forth in one day ? or shall a nation 

be born at once ? 
For Zion hath travailed, and at once brought forth her children. 

9 Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth ? saith the 

Lord : 

Shall I beget and shut up the womb ? saith thy God. 

10 Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all ye that 
love her : 

Rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn for her : 
l That ye may suck, and be satisfied, from the breasts of her con- 
solations : 

That ye may milk out, and be delighted, from the abundance of her 
glory. 

12 For thus saith the Lord, 

Behold, I extend peace to her like a river, 

And the glory of the Gentiles like an over-flowing stream : 

And ye shall suck, 

Ye shall be borne upon the side, and be dandled upon the knees. 

13 As a man whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you ; 
And ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. 

14 And ye shall see and your heart shall rejoice, 
And your bones shall flourish like an herb : 

And the hand of the Lord shall be known toward his servants, 
And his indignation toward his enemies. 

15 For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, 
And his chariots like a whirlwind, 

To render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. 

16 For by fire and by his sword doth the Lord plead with all flesh : 
And the slain of the Lord are many. 

17 They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves, for the gardens, 
Following one in the midst, 

Eating swine's flesh and the abomination and the mouse, 
Shall be consumed together : the Lord hath declared it. 

18 And I know their works and their thoughts : 

The time is come to gather all nations and tongues; 
And they are come, and see my glory. 

19 And I have set a sign among them, 



442 



ISAIAH LXVI. 



And I have sent the escaped of them unto the nations, 
To Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, that draw the bow, 
To Tubal, and Javan, to the isles afar off, 
That had not heard my fame, neither seen my glory ; 
And they have declared my glory among the Gentiles. 

20 And they have brought all your brethren, out of all nations, an 

offering unto the Lord, 
With horses, and with chariots, and with litters, and with mules, 

and with dromedaries, 
To my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith the Lord, 
As the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into 

the house of the Lord. 

21 And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, saith the 

Lord. 

22 For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I make, 
Remain before me, saith the Lord, 

So shall your seed and your name remain. 

23 And it shall come to pass, that from new moon to new moon, 
And from sabbath to sabbath, 

Shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. 

24 And they shall go forth, 

And look upon the carcases of the men that have revolted from 
me : 

For their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched ; 
And they shall be an abhorrence unto all flesh. 



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